The art of thought

THE ART OF THOUGHT

n

JONATHAN CAPE

THIRTY BEDFORD SQUARE LONDON

FIRST PUBLISHED IN MCMXXVI
MADE &? PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
BY BUTLER & TANNER LTD
F R O M E AND
LONDON

r~ ycv K.

PREFACE

During the last twenty years I have from time to time
attempted to explore the problem how far the know¬
ledge accumulated by modern psychology can be made
useful for the improvement of the thought-processes of
a working thinker. I have published chapters dealing
with various sections of that problem in my Human
Nature in Politics (1908), Chapters II to V, The Great
Society (1914), Chapters III, X and XI, and Our Social
Heritage (1921), Chapters II, III and IV.

This book is intended to be, not a summing up of my
earlier attempts, but an extension of my inquiry, par¬
ticularly as regards the less conscious factors in thought.
In particular, I have not here dealt with the problem
of organized co-operation in thought, which I
discussed in Chapter XI of The Great Society. My
footnotes and quotations will indicate the psycho¬
logical books which have helped me. But my main
material has been derived from my experience, during
more than forty years, as a teacher and administrator,
and from the accounts of their thought-processes given
by poets and others who were not professed psycholo¬
gists, by some of my students, and by friends in
England and America.

If my book helps a few young thinkers in the prac¬
tice of their art, or induces some other psychological
inquirer to explore the problem with greater success
than my own, I shall be more than content.

LONDON UNIVERSITY. GRAHAM WALLAS

London , s.w.7

3

£

5

SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTERS

CHAP. PAGE

I PSYCHOLOGY AND THOUGHT 23

Men have recently increased their power
over Nature, without increasing the con¬
trol of that power by thought. We can
make war more efficiently, but cannot
prevent war; we can explore the world,
but cannot contrive an interracial world-
policy; and the same want of intellectual
control exists, within each nation, in
politics, philosophy and art. We require,
therefore, both more effective thinking
on particular problems, and an improved
art of thought, in which scientific explan¬
ation may overtake and guide empirical
rules. But in thought, as in cookery,
science lags behind empiricism, and the
study of modern psychological text¬
books may even hinder effective think¬
ing. This fact is largely due to the use
by psychologists of the ‘mechanist’ con¬
ception of instinct as ‘power,’ and of
reason as ‘machine.’ Some of the best
modern physiologists and psychologists
are, however, opposed to that concep¬
tion, and substitute for it the ‘hormist’
conception of the human organism as an
imperfectly integrated combination of
7

8

SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTERS

living elements, each of which retains
some initiative of its own, while co-oper¬
ating with the rest in securing the good
of the whole organism. The aim of the
art of thought is an improved co-ordina¬
tion of these elements in the process of
thought.

CHAP.

II CONSCIOUSNESS AND WILL

The thinker must also fight against his
own ‘common-sense’ conception of con¬
sciousness and will as simple and abso¬
lute unities. Consciousness varies from
‘full’ consciousness to unconsciousness,
and from comparatively unified con¬
sciousness to ‘co-consciousness’; and the
thinker must train himself to observe his
less conscious as well as his more con¬
scious psychological experiences. Will,
also, varies, from full volition to non¬
volition, and from comparatively unified
volition to ‘co-volition.’ The distribution
of volitional control over the various fac¬
tors in our organism is, indeed, curiously
incomplete and arbitrary; so that Plato
and others have found difficulty in re¬
lating conscious purpose to creative
thought. The similarity of the charac¬
teristics and limitations of consciousness,

PAGE

48

9

SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTERS

will, and organic life has led many
thinkers to believe that they may be
three different aspects of the same
fact.

CHAP.

Ill THOUGHT BEFORE ART

The art of thought is a modification by
conscious effort of a ‘natural’ form of
human behaviour. In a civilized adult,
it is very difficult to observe mental be¬
haviour apart from acquired habit; but
if we make a necessarily rough distinc¬
tion between nature and acquirement,
we find that the main ‘natural’ process
which the art of thought attempts to
modify is the ‘association of ideas,’ which
Aristotle and Hobbes observed by ex¬
amining the memory of past association-
trains, and Yarendonck and others by the
more difficult but more fruitful method
of examining association-trains during
their occurrence. Varendonck empha¬
sizes the risings and fallings of conscious¬
ness which accompany the ‘natural’
association-trains, and describes the ‘dia¬
logue form’ which results from automatic
mental attempts to solve psychological
situations. He correlates rising and fall¬
ing consciousness with rising and falling

PAGE

59

IO SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTERS

rationality; and, less successfully, with
the use of verbal and visual imagery.
Varendonck’s evidence is influenced by
the fact that all his observations took
place while he was falling asleep, and
also, like that of H. Poincare, by an
oversimplified ‘mechanist’ theory of the
relation between thought and instinctive
emotion. But the thinker, from the re¬
cord of such observations, and from his
own introspection, can make for himself
a working conception of that natural
association-process which his art is to
modify.

CHAP.

IV STAGES OF CONTROL

At what stages in the association-process
should the thinker bring the conscious
effort of his art to bear? If we examine
a single achievement of thought we can
distinguish four stages — Preparation,
Incubation, Illumination (and its accom¬
paniments), and Verification. At the
Preparation stage we can consciously ac¬
cumulate knowledge, divide up by logi¬
cal rules the field of inquiry, and adopt a
definite ‘problem attitude.’ In Verifica¬
tion we can consciously follow out rules
like those used in Preparation. At the

PAGE

79

SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTERS

ii

Incubation stage we can consciously
arrange, either to think on other subjects
than the proposed problem, or to rest
from any form of conscious thought.
This second form of Incubation is often
necessary for the severer types of intel¬
lectual production, which would be hin¬
dered either by interruption or by con¬
tinuous passive reading. If we are con¬
sciously to control the Illumination stage
we must include in it the ‘fringe-con¬
scious* psychological events which pre¬
cede and accompany the ‘flash* of Illu¬
mination, and which may be called
Intimation. We can to some degree
control Illumination by making our¬
selves conscious (as many poets are
conscious) of Intimation; and by both
encouraging the psychological pro¬
cesses which Intimation shows to be
occurring, and protecting them from
interruption.

CHAP.

V THOUGHT AND EMOTION

A difficulty in the voluntary control of
thought arises from the elusive character
of ‘emotion* or ‘affect.’ Sensation and
imagery are less elusive than emotion;
and poets and artists have attempted to

PAGE

108

12

SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTERS

retain their emotions by associating them
with images of sensation. On the other
hand, emotions can call up ideas, and
nations have sometimes to choose be¬
tween a vernacular language whose emo¬
tional associations may provide intellec¬
tual stimulus, and a more exact literary
language with fewer emotional associ¬
ations. The intellectual influence of
certain emotions, such as humour and
sympathy, can best be appreciated by
considering them separately. In poetic
creation, one of the strongest intellec¬
tual influences comes from the emotion
of ‘significance.’ A century ago, the
problem of the relation between thought
and emotional association was discussed
by using the terms ‘reason’ and ‘imag¬
ination’; Shelley described his personal
intellectual development from ‘reason,’
which attempted to inhibit emotion, to
‘imagination,’ which used the whole
content of consciousness as a guide both
to truth and to human values.

CHAP.

VI THOUGHT AND HABIT

All mental activities, beside their imme¬
diate effects in the production of thought,
have later effects in the production of

PAGE

133

i3

SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTERS

mental habits; and it is sometimes con¬
venient to consider the activity as means,
and the habit as end. A regular time-
stimulus is useful as producing the habit
of ‘warming up,’ and may be combined
with the stimulus of place or circum¬
stance, or of the muscular movements of
fingers or lips. But we should not be¬
come the slaves of habit; the best admini¬
strators often attempt to get a fresh point
of intellectual departure by breaking
their own mental habits; and those who
have to work to a time-table should sys¬
tematically watch and record their unha-
bitual ‘fringe-thoughts.’ Such thoughts
w'ill often come at moments outside the
working day, and it is specially impor¬
tant for the social thinker to observe and
select them during newspaper reading.
Mental habits should vary with the
natural powers, the age, and the subjects
of study, of the thinker; and the manage¬
ment of habit is specially important for
thinkers who are teachers or journalists.
The daily conflict between the stimulus
of habit-keeping and that of habit-break¬
ing, is only part of the larger problem
of regularity and adventure in the life of
a creative thinker.

PAGE

H SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTERS

CHAP.

VII EFFORT AND ENERGY

Further analysis is required of the facts
behind our use in psychology of such
words as ‘effort,’ ‘energy,’ and ‘ease.’
Creative artists often describe their
moments of greatest intellectual energy
as being without effort, but the artist
himself cannot always tell whether the
absence of effort means an increase or a
decline of energy, especially in those
cases where a mental activity which origi¬
nally required severe effort has become
habitual. Spencer describes a habit of
relaxed mental energy, and Mill a habit
by which he constantly renewed his men¬
tal energy. But efforts vary not only in
intensity, but also in the character of
their ‘stroke,’ and many men have wasted
their efforts because they never dis¬
covered the right stroke for their work.
Sometimes the effective stimulation of
mental energy depends on the relation
between thought and ‘emotion’; extreme
emotion may, however, weaken thought;
or the emotional factors in our organism
may fail to respond to an intellectual call
for energy. Some thinkers have advo¬
cated the production of organic harmony
by the general organic relaxation of

150

SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTERS

15

‘power through repose’; but the purpose
of thought is not organic harmony but
truth, and the seeker for truth must al¬
ways be prepared to sacrifice harmony.
The harmony resulting from action is
more effective for the production of
energy than the harmony of repose; but
action, if it is to heighten intellectual
energy, must be relevant to our purpose,
and to those conditions outside ourselves
on which the fulfilment of our purpose
depends. The ‘energy’ of which the psy¬
chologist speaks is an empirical fact of
introspection; it may some day be related
to the measurable ‘energy’ of the physi¬
cist and the physiologist.

chap. page

VIII TYPES OF THOUGHT I7I

Certain ways of using the mind are char¬
acteristic of nations, professions and
other human groups. Some of these are
the unconscious results of environment;
others have been consciously invented;
and others are due to a combination of
invention and environment. The French
and English nations have acquired differ¬
ent mental habits and ideals which they
indicate respectively by the word ‘logic’
and the phrase ‘muddling through.’

16 SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTERS

Each habit has advantages and dangers,
and it may be hoped that a new habit will
some day be developed which will com¬
bine both advantages and avoid both dan¬
gers. It is less easy to detect an American
type of thought. There are indications
that a more elastic and effective mental
habit may be developing in America than
is found elsewhere, but that habit cannot
yet be called the national type. The
‘pioneer’ habit of mind is perhaps more
prevalent in America than any other
single type; but it seems to be rapidly
dissolving under the influence of indus¬
trial development, religious change, and
the spread of popular interest in psycho¬
logy. A new standard of intellectual
energy may ultimately come to be ac¬
cepted in America, accompanied by a
new moral standard in the conduct of the
mind, and a new popular appreciation of
the more difficult forms of intellectual
effort.

CHAP.

IX

DISSOCIATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS

The history of the art of thought has been
greatly influenced by the invention of
methods of producing the phenomena of
‘dissociated consciousness.’ The simplest

PAGE

204

SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTERS

i7

and most ancient of these are the methods
of producing a hypnotic trance by the
monotonous repetition of nervous stimuli.
Such methods have important and some¬
times beneficial effects on the functions
of the lower nervous system; and a slight
degree of dissociation may assist some of
the higher thought-processes; but the
evidence seems to indicate that the best
intellectual and artistic work is not done
in a condition of serious dissociation.
Dissociation, however, often produces
intense intellectual conviction; and the
future of religion and philosophy, in both
the West and the East, depends largely
on the conditions under which that con¬
viction is accepted as valid. In Western
Christianity, methods of ‘meditation’
have been invented, especially by Saint
Ignatius, which are intended to avoid the
dangers of mere dissociation; but the
process of direction of the association-
trains of ideas and emotions by an effort
of will is so difficult that it constantly re¬
sults in the production of the same state
of dissociation as that produced by the
earlier and more direct expedient of self¬
hypnotism. And, since dissociation re¬
mains the most effective means of pro¬
ducing intellectual conviction by an act

B

18 SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTERS

of will, those who now desire to practise
the ‘will to believe,’ are still thrown back
on the old problem of the validity of con¬
viction produced by dissociative methods.

CHAP.

X THE THINKER AT SCHOOL

The discipline of the art of thought
should begin at an age when the choice
of intellectual methods must be mainly
made, not by the student, but by
teachers and administrators. If Plato
were born in London or New York, how
could we help him to become a thinker?
He would be a self-active organism, living
and growing in an environment far less
stimulating than that of ancient Athens,
and unable to discover for himself the
best ways of using his mind. His educa¬
tion should involve a compromise be¬
tween his powers as a child and his needs
as a future adult; he should acquire
steadily increasing experience of mental
effort and fatigue, and of the energy
which results from the right kind of
effort; he will need periodical leisure,
with its opportunities and dangers. The
present experimental schools in which
students are left to acquire thought-
methods by their own ‘trial and error’

PAGE

228

SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTERS

r 9

have not always been successful, and the
individual hints of a clever teacher as to
mental method often fail. It may, there¬
fore, be hoped that a knowledge of the
outlines of the psychology of thought
may become a recognized part of the
school and college curriculum; experi¬
mental evidence already exists as to the
effect of such knowledge in improving
the mental technique of a student.

CHAP.

XI PUBLIC EDUCATION

In the case of four-fifths of the inhabi¬
tants of a modern industrial community,
inventions of educational method will
only increase the output of thought, in
so far as they are actually brought to bear
on the potential thinker by the adminis¬
trative machinery of public education.
That machinery is everywhere new, and
was originally based on an over-simple
conception of the problem. In England,
we are slowly realizing the necessity,
(a) of making more complex provision
for the ‘average’ student, and ( b ) of pro¬
viding special treatment for the sub¬
normal or supernormal student. Differen¬
tial public education for the supernormal
working-class child had to wait for the

PAGE

256

20

SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTERS

invention of a technique of mental diag¬
nosis, and only began in England at the
end of the nineteenth century; the sys¬
tem is still insufficiently developed, and
there is a serious danger that an exten¬
sion of the age of compulsion in its pre¬
sent form may lessen the productivity of
the most supernormal minds. If this
danger is to be avoided, we must recon¬
sider our present compulsory system,
with a presumption in favour of liberty
and variety; American experience shows
the intellectual disadvantages involved in
the compulsory enforcement of anything
like a uniform system of secondary edu¬
cation.

CHAP.

XII TEACHING AND DOING

The proposal to raise the age of educa¬
tional compulsion is often combined, in
England, with a scheme to make teach¬
ing, like law and medicine, a close ‘self-
governing’ profession, with a monopoly
of public service. That scheme involves
serious dangers to the intellectual life of
the community, and especially to the
training of potential thinkers; it ignores
not only the possible opposition of inter¬
est between the consumers and the pro-

PAGE

279

SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTERS

21

ducers of education, but also the ‘de¬
marcation’ problem between the pro¬
ducers of education and the producers of
thought. This over-simplification of the
problem is partly due to the fact that
those engaged in the more general forms
of intellectual production are not organ¬
ized, and do not claim, as other profes¬
sions claim, a part in the training for
their profession. Experience shows that
the teaching of any function is sterilized
if it is separated from ‘doing’; but are the
English-speaking democracies prepared
to offer special and expensive educational
opportunities to a small minority of
future professional thinkers? Perhaps
some local authority might be induced
(if legislation closing the teaching pro¬
fession did not, meanwhile, make it im¬
possible) to start an experimental school
for students from all social classes who
belong to the highest one per cent, in re¬
spect of intellectual supernormality, and
who ask to be prepared for a career of
professed thought. The staff of such a
school would be so chosen as to keep in
touch with intellectual work outside the
school; the students would be encour¬
aged both to develop their own individ¬
ual talents, and to realize the social sig-

22

SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTERS

nificance of their work; and the success
of the school might influence the develop¬
ment of a new intellectual standard in
other schools. But such an expenditure
of public funds would run counter both
to professional interests and to many of
the traditions of democratic equality, and
it may have to wait for a widespread
change in popular world-outlook.

I

PSYCHOLOGY AND THOUGHT

It is a commonplace that, during the last two centuries,

men have enormously increased their power over^_

nature without increasing the control of that power by
thought. In the sphere of international and interracial
relations, our chemists and engineers are now contriv¬
ing, by technical methods whose subtlety would have
been inconceivable to our grandfathers, plans for the
destruction of London and Paris; but when French and
British statesmen meet to prevent those plans from
being put into operation, they find it no easier than
would the leaders of two Stone Age tribes to form a
common purpose, and they generally part with noth¬
ing better than a vague hop e that war may be avoided
by accident and inertia. The nations of Europe seem
unable, even after the Locarno Pact, either to amend the
Peace of Versailles, or, if it is not amended, to provide
against the danger of a new world-struggle which may
be succeeded by such a Dark Age as succeeded the
break-up of the Roman Empire. And it is not only in
dealing with the master-problem of war that we show
t his inability to control by taki ng th ought, our new o
powers. We are, for instance, ra pidly learni ng so,to
c onqu er insect-borne dise ase a s to make possible the
residence of a lar gely increased n umber of w hite men ^
in the tropics; but throughoutTthe great er .part. of.
Africa’ neit her the white invaders no r the European^

23

24

Ch. i

THE ART OF THOUGHT

governments to which they are nominally subordinate

have thought out any better policy than the reduction

of the black population to a condition of statutory servi¬

tude^ leading some day to pitiless massacres of masters
by slaves and of slaves by masters. In the Pacific no one
has produced a scheme for the settlement of thinly-
populated territory which is based on any wider concep¬
tion than the separate advantage of competing races
and states.

I n the sphere of internal policy there Js, within the
closely guarded frontiers of every state, a turmoil of
new ideas; but those ideas have been so far more
successful in weakening the traditions on which out-
existing civilization is based than in showing the way
towards anything better. The majority of the inhabit¬
ants of Europe now live under constitutions invented
by Lenin, Mussolini, Rivera, or by the founders of the
German Republic and of the Austrian and Russian
succession states; but no one exce pt a few partisan s
believes that stable forms of relation between the citizen

and the s tate, or between the state and other political
and social organizations, have_been_yet invented. In
economic life criticism h as far outrun construction; the
individu alist, collectivist, and syndicalist conception s of
i ndustrial organization have~alT be en discr edited, but
no new conception has established itself. In jurispru¬
dence every one laughs at Austin’s utilitarianism and
Hegel’s idealism, but no one proposes any substitute
for them. In literature, paint ing, and music, aesthetic
t radition has been so broken that the young painter or

Ch. I PSYCHOLOGY AND THOUGHT 25

poet cannot settle to his work until he h as found his.
way through a wilderness o f half-formulated psycho¬
logical theories. In personal conduct, young men and
women find that new knowledge has shaken traditional
sexual and family morality; but that there is as yet no
sign that a period of ethical reconstruction is at hand.

The United States of America are more fortunate than
the states of Europe, in that they are comparatively
safe from external attack; but in American politics,
economics, literature, religion, and ethics the difficul¬
ties arising from the failure of human thought to con¬
trive an adaptation of human society to its new environ¬
ment are equally obvious.

Thought, therefore , w hether as the con centrated
mental activity of the professed thinke r, or as penetrat-
i ng and guiding other activities, is now required mope*'"'^
urgently than ever before in the history of mankind..
Thought, if we are to escape disaster, is needed in many
specialized fields; we must construct a more accurate
and better-proportioned conception of the past; separ¬
ate groups of students must explore biology and
physics, politics and sociology, and must try to see the
relation of their studies to each other, to the ancient
problems of philosophy, and to that beauty of words
and form and colour by which our thoughts are made
more permanent and more significant; thousands of
political and social expedients must be invented. But
i n this book I shall argue that we must also consid er .

how far itjs possible for us t o improve those processes ’ 0

of thought itself which are used xn all the specialized

26 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. i

studie s, how far, that is to say, we can produce a more
effective art of though t.

For the purposes of that inquiry it will be convenient
to make a rough division between the more empirical
and the more scientific elements in any art — between
the methods learnt by each practitioner from his own
experience or from imitation of other practitioners,
and the wider principles by which those methods can
be explained or corrected. So metimes empiricism lags
behind science, and sometimes science lags behind

empiricism. Seventy years ago, for instance, Baron

Justus von Liebig was the acknowledged leader of the
chemical science which then claimed to cover the field
of the empirical processes of selecting and cooking
food; while the chef of the Reform Club might be
taken as being a leader of the empirical ‘mystery’ of
-^food-preparation, handed on by one chef to another,
and indicated in the ‘cookery books’ which were so
strikingly unlike the text-books of chemistry. We now
know that if in 1855 the Reform Club chef had been
asked to prepare the best dinner he could, and if Baron
Liebig had been asked to order another dinner, to be
prepared in the same kitchen and by the same body of
cooks, the chef’s dinner would have been much the
better, from the point of view of health as well as of
enjoyment. Empiricism was then well ahead of science
in the art of cooking, and it was only in 1915, that,
owing to t he unrewarded discomforts e.ndnrpd hy srnrrg
of small mammals, fed alternately on margarine and
butter in the little Wesleyan chapel at Cambridge, the

Ch.x PSYCHOLOGY AND THOUGHT 27

chemists demonstrated the importance of the vitamines.
Now, perhaps, a professor of bio-chemistry, if he had
the necessary modesty and humour, might give a few
useful hints to the chef of the Reform Club as to the
cooking of fats and vegetables; and might even learn
from him, as Darwin learnt from the empirical pigeon-
breeders, suggestions leading to new scientific princi¬
ples. The study of atomic structure by the science of
physics has been more successful in catching up the
empirical processes of tempering and alloying metals,
and a trained metallurgical physicist is now an ordinary
and useful member of the staff of any large steel-works.
Metallurgy is, indeed, a good instance of a sphere of
action in which science and practice are now keeping'
step, and are producing a rapidly progressive ‘scientific
art.’

How, in this respect, do things stand with the ex¬
pedients by which men are helped in the process of
thought? How near are we to the creati on of a ‘scientific
art’ of though t? Both in our own time and in the past,
t hought has, of cour se, been helped by advanc es in t he
sciences of logic and mathematics. Roman law, for
instance, could not have arisen from the practice of the
courts, if Aristotle and others had not first made the
science of formal logic; and those methods of contriv¬
ing and interpreting experiments which have produced
our modern control over physical nature have had to
wait throughout on progress in the science of mathe¬
matics. Even in the sphere of social thought, progress
has, in our own time, largely depended upon those

28

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. i

quasi-mathematical methods of presenting and com¬
paring the statistical results of the relation between
independently varying causes which date from the
work of Descartes and Leibnitz. And modern thought
in all regions has depended for most of its subject-
matter on knowledge accumulated and arranged by
‘scientific’ methods.

But behind the use by thinkers of rules and materials
drawn from the sciences there has always been, since
the dawn of civilization, an unformulated ‘mystery’ of
thought which has been ‘explained’ by no science, and
has been independently discovered, lost, and redis¬
covered, by successive creative thinkers. Plato learnt
from Socrates, Sophocles from iEschylus, Masaccio
from Ghiberti, Marlowe, Jonson and Shakespeare, or
Hamilton and Madison, learnt from each other, some¬
thing which was neither logic nor accumulated know¬
ledge; and Faraday, when he became assistant to Sir
Humphry Davy, learnt from his master something
which thenceforth changed his use of his mind, and
which helped to give efficiency to his thought about
those observed chemical and physical facts and mathe¬
matical methods which he also learnt.

That ‘something’ lies in the field now claimed by the
science of psychology; but a very strong case could be
made out for the proposition that a young thinker who
should to-day submissively study the current text-books
of psychology would be as little likely to improve his
work as would have been a young apprentice cook at
the Reform Club in 1855, if he had absorbed all Baron

Ch.i PSYCHOLOGY AND THOUGHT 29

Liebig’s Organic Chemistry . A thinker can learn from
the present text-books of psychology useful hints as to
the results of fatigue, as to detailed methods of memoriz-'
ing, and as to means of correcting some of the defects of
his sense-impressions. But it is difficult for the most
patient reader to get much practical help from the
existing records of laboratory experiments on the
simpler forms of thought; and whoever reads those
short chapters on ‘Reasoning’ or ‘Thought’ which in
the general psychological treatises cover the whole sub¬
ject of intellectual activity, often fe els as a member of
t he audience might feel at an o r g aruecital if the wind-.
pressure in the organ sudde nly dropped.- Some, indeed,
of the best psychologists warn us that their science can,
in that region, offer us no practical help whatever.
Professor Pillsbu ry, for instance, is only a little more
explicit than some others when he says, ‘ No rules can
be given for making the unfertile brain fertile, nor for 1
the better use of the fertile brain .’ 1 '

And, unfortunately, that section of current psycho¬
logy which deals with thought may be not only useless
but much worse than useless to the would-be thinker.
Psychology has been deeply and necessarily influenced
by recent growths in our knowledge of nerve-physio¬
logy, and physiologists and psychologists alike have
tended to base on that knowledge a series of summary
generalizations, often expressed in clumsy mechanical
metaphors, on just that point — the relation of thought
to other physiological and psychological processes —

1 W. B. Pillsbury, The Fundamentals of Psychology (1923), p. 4 2 9 -

30 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. i

where a practitioner of the art of thought requires most
exact and guarded statement. Men, for thousands of
years, have vaguely connected the psychological events
—* of which they were conscious in themselves with differ¬
ent parts of their bodies. To the Greek poets and
philosophers pity seemed related to the abdomen, cour¬
age to the beating heart, and intense thought to the
diaphragm which controls our breathing. The modern
physiologists, by dissection under the microscope of the
nerves of men and other animals, combined with obser¬
vation of the behaviour of various parts of the organism
under experimental conditions, have concentrated
attention on the nervous system. In the primitive
behaviour-cycle which begins with the impact of some
external stimulus upon a sense-organ, and ends with a
movement of the limb-muscles, the physiologists have
been able to follow the passage of the stimulation along
the ‘afferent’ nerves from the sense-organ to points
where they come into relation with the ‘efferent’ nerves,
down which the counter-stimulations pass to the
muscles. They tell us that when the original stimula¬
tion reaches the spinal cord, it may cause immediate
and automatic muscular ‘reflexes’ (such as scratching
an irritated place on the skin, or adjusting the limbs to
prevent falling) even in an animal the whole of whose
brain has been removed. But the stimulation may also
reach those more recen tl y e volved nervous outg rowths
of the spinal cord w hich are roughly distinguished as
the ‘lower’ and the ‘upper’ brain. When it reaches the
carpet of interlacing nerves which forms the ‘cortex’

Ch.i PSYCHOLOGY AND THOUGHT 31

or ‘grey matter * of the mammalian upper brain, it sets
a sort of telephone-exchange into oper ation, and
n ervous events take place w hich appear in conscious-
ness as memories and associations and su ggestions.
The original sense-stimulus is recognized as part of a
‘situation ,’ 1 and a new message, representing a solution
of that situation, may travel back through the lower
brain to the nerves attached to the muscles. This
cortical message may then give rise to an ‘intelligent’
muscular movement, added to, or modifying, or in¬
hibiting the ‘reflex’ movements which originate in the
spinal cord, and the more ‘instinctive’ movements
which are related to the lower brain, and are normally
accompanied by conscious ‘emotions.’

A scientist born in the second half of the nineteenth
century could hardly prevent himself, when describing
this series of events, from using terms taken from the
behaviour of power-driven machinery. He was almost
certain to ask himself what was the ‘power’ in the pro¬
cess, and what was the ‘machine.’ There seemed to be
‘power’ acting within the spinal cord and its related
‘sympathetic’ nerve centres, and revealing itself in the
reflex movements; but that power had no apparent con¬
nection with the intelligent element in behaviour. On
the other hand, the process of‘association of ideas’ in the
upper brain did not seem to reveal much independent

1 See K. Koffka, The Growth of the Mind (1924), and Koehler, The
Mentality of Apes (1925), for evidence indicating that i ntelligent m am¬
malian action is stimulated not bv a sensation as such but by a sensation
as indicating a ‘situation* calling for action.

32

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. i

‘power’ of its own. There remained the intermediate
stage of the lower brain with its instincts and their
appropriate emotions. These instincts had obvious
driving power, and it was undeniable that instinctive
impulses often initiated the process of ‘association’ in
the upper brain as a means of attaining their satisfac¬
tion. He was apt, therefore, to conclude th at ‘ins tinct, ’
or ‘emotio n,’ or ‘instinctive emotio n’ was the ‘po wer’
r equire d; a nd that ‘intelligence’ or ‘reason* w as the
‘machine.’ Professor J. T. MacCurdy, for instance,
says that ‘the static, intellectual functions of the mind
^ are like the mechanisms of the automobile; the emo¬
tional or instinctive functions -are like its thermody¬
namics,’ 1 and Professor MacDougall, in his Outline of
Psychology (1923, p. 440 «.), says that ‘it is the paradox
of Intelligence that it directs forces or energies without
being itself a force of energy.’ Even the great physi¬
ologist, Sir Charles Sherrington, in his Presidential
Address to the British Association in 1923, spoke of the
human mind as ‘actuated by instinct but instrumented

by reason .’ David Hume, writing in 1739, when Hart¬
ley had already started physiological psychology, but
before the rise of machine-industry, expressed the same
conclusion in terms of the ancient industrial system
based on slavery. ‘Reason,’ he said, ‘has no original
influence,’ it ‘is, and ought only to be the slave of the
passions, and can never pretend to any other office than
to serve and obey them.’ 2

1 Problems in Dynamic Psychology, 1923, p. x.

2 Collected Works, Vol. II, pp. 194-5.

Ch.i PSYCHOLOGY AND THOUGHT 33

This ‘mechanist’ co nception of the relation between
i nstinct and though t is based on ascertained facts, is ex¬
tremely clear, and is sufficient both for the professor of
physiology who is superintending an experiment, and
for the professor of psychology who is standing before
his black-board, or sitting at his desk and marking
examination answers. It is on ly when it is used as am—
actual guide to thinking that it breaks down. The
generalizations of Baron Liebig as to the chemistry of
nutrition also served excellently well for the introduc¬
tory black-board explanations given by the cookery | ^
instructresses when I was a member of the London 1
School Board; and, since neither the instructresses nor *
their pupils troubled about them when it was a question
of cooking anything, no difficulties arose. In the same
way, it is probable that the majority even of the most
‘mechanist’ psychologists, when they are thinking
whether a new theory is sound or not, do not often
relate their methods of speculation to their belief that
their instincts are, and their intelligence is not, ‘a
force or energy.’ B ut th ere is on e group of thinkers
who have in our own time taken the ‘mechanist’ con -

ception of the relation of instinct to reason as a guide

for their own intellectual metho ds. T hese are the

Marxian Communists in Russia and elsewhere; I have,
for instance, before me an admirably written Outline oj
Psychology published in 1921 (perhaps with the aid of
the Third International) by the Plebs League, who
were British representatives of what the book calls ‘the
Fighting Culture of the Proletariat.’ Its purpose is

34 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. i

stated to be ‘to introduce the student to the science of
human behaviour, and to the study of the mechanism
on which behaviour depends’ (p. i), and it contains
many quotations from MacDougall’s works. On almost
every page the word ‘mechanism’ occurs once or more,
and t he writers con stantly i nsist that thought is a
machine, inert in itself, but driven by the force of in¬

stinct. Readers are told tha t they ‘must realize clearly’
that ‘ou r political convicti ons, our moral and ethical
codes . . . the class-consciousness of the workers and
that of the capitalists; all these are ultimately founded on
n on-rational complexes, w hi ch urge us on to the actions
we p erform’ (p. 4). ‘Our wants and conations, the
strivings of our instincts, emotions, and habits . . .
furnish the standard by which the reason judges. . . .
^Reasoning is an accompaniment, but not a cause of

action ’ (p. 82); and the whole argument leads to the
conclusion that ‘in all crises’ the ‘dictatorship of a small
minority’ (p. 98) who have realized these facts is
essential. The men who now rule Russia combine this
‘mechanist’ conception of the relation between instinct
and reason with a rigid metaphysical dogma of prede¬

terminism, and are able by that combination to con¬
vince themselves that such a ‘bourgeois’ intellectual
process as unbiased reflection before one acts in obedi¬
ence to one’s simplest animal instincts, is at the same
time biologically impossible, and also biologically
possible but politically and economically inadmissible.
And they seem determined to stamp out among their

fellow-citizens, with the thoroughness of the Spanish

Ch. i PSYCHOLOGY AND THOUGHT 3$

I nquisition, all those methods of inventive thought

which originally enabled Marx to think and write D as

Kapital.

The present position, indeed, of the conception of
instinct as force and intelligence as machine compels
anyone who desires, as I do, to get help for the practical
art of thought from the science of psychology, to form a
judgment of his own, on the best evidence he can find,
as to physiologico-psychological questions which he
would normally prefer to leave to the specialized expert.
If, therefore, I were told, as a teacher of political science,
by a young communist student whose mind had not
yet been completely closed by dogma, that this
mechanist conception is (whether we like or dislike its
political effects) forced on us by the full authority of
modern psychology and physiology, I should begin by
pointing out that during the last three or four years
some of the best psychologists and physiologists seem to
have rejected both ‘mechanist’ language on this point
and the grossly over-simplified conception of intelligent
behaviour to which its use is apt to lead. At the Oxford
International Psychological Congress, for instance, of
1923, Dr. C. S. Myers as President protested against
the prevailing tendency ‘to suppose that all percepts,
ideas and volitions, all forms of cognition and conation,
derive their motor effects from the energy which they
obtain from related affects. According to some, indeed,
this energy is ultimately to be derived from a single
affect - the sexual emotion. But the past neglect of
instinctive and emotional feelings should not,’ he

Ch.i

36 THE ART OF THOUGHT

warned the Congress, ‘cause us to overlook the activity
involved in perceiving or thinking, or to regard per¬
cepts or thoughts (e.g. ends) as merely inert “mental
matter” whose “movement” (nay, whose very “exist¬
ence” in consciousness) is dependent solely on the force
of propulsion or repression derived from feeling. Cog¬
nitive and affective experiences are not thus to be
isolated in their beginnings.’ 1

I should then ask my young communist to forget
that he ever saw a machine, and to c onceive of th e
human organism as a combination of livin g elements,
all of which tend to co-operate in securing the good of
t he organis m (or of the species of which the organism
is a temporary representative), but each of which retains
some measure of initiative — so that the co-operation is
never mechanica lly perfect. I should quote Dr. Henry
Head’s statement at the same Congress that ‘the aim
of the evolutionary development of the central nervous
system is to integrate its diverse and contradictory re¬
actions, so as to produce a coherent result adapted to
the welfare of the organism as a whole,’ 2 and should
emphasize his assumption that human integration is
not complete, and that ‘diverse and contradictory re¬
actions’ do occur. This conception might be easier to
employ if all young people had learnt a little physiology
)at school. It could then be pointed out to them that
l the phagocytes (or ‘white corpuscles’) which wander

1 Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of Psychology

( P . 188).

2 Ibid., p. 180.

Ch. I PSYCHOLOGY AND THOUGHT 37

about in our blood, co-operate with the rest of the
organism by surrounding and digesting intruding
bacteria; but that in doing so the phagocytes act as
living and behaving things, and not as the purely
mechanical instruments of a force external to them¬
selves. Each phagocyte, indeed, hunts and digests
nearly as independently as if it were an isolated inhabit¬
ant of a warm tropical sea. A man’s hair co-operates
with the rest of his organism by protecting his brain
from blows and from sudden changes of temperature;
but it may go on growing, though the man has ceased *
to live. His epithelial cells may begin at any moment
to proliferate independently, and so cause death by
cancer. Red blood-corpuscles, or patches of skin, trans¬
ferred from one man to another may both continue
their own activities and also co-operate in the wider
functions of the new organism of which they are now
parts.

And the same combination of co-operating elements,
each of which subserves the good of the whole, while
itself retaining some measure of initiative, is found in
the functions of the nervous system. When Wood-,
worth says of the psychological factors in man that
‘a ny m echanism, except, perhaps, some of the most
rudimentary that give the simple reflexes [I should my¬
self reject this exception], once it is aroused, is capable
of furnishing its own drive and also of lending drive to
other connected mechanisms,’ 1 he is using language
drawn from the ‘mechanist’ conception to express the
1 R. S. Woodworth, Dynamic Psychology (1918), p. 67.

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. i

38

v ery different conception (Tor which I am here arguing)
of the co-operati ng parts of an organism as each possess¬

i ng its own drive. The G r eek word forTdriv e’ is
‘ horme,’ a nd therefore Professor T. P. N unn (in his
Education , its Data and First Principles, 1920, p. 21)
called t his the ‘hormic conception’ or ‘hor mism .’ Hor-
mism does not deny that all the parts of an o rgan ism
tend towards integrated action. But it substitutes the
conception of a living and imperfect tendency towards
integration for the conception of a mechanical and per¬
fect integration. The behaviour of a steam engine i s
completely integrate d; because the parts of the engin e
have no force of their own, and on ly obey the force of

the steam from the boiler. The behaviour of the human

organism tends towards integration, for otherwise the
organism could not, as an organism, exist; but its inte^
gration is not complete, because its parts possess in
varying de grees a force of their o wn. 1

1 Though MacDougall is the most influential authority for what I
here call the ‘mechanist’ view of the relation between instinct and rea¬
son, he himself, in his Outline of Psychology (1923), pp. 72 and 218,
and in an article in Psyche (July, 1924, p. 27), adopts, while arguing
against Loeb, Watson, and others, what he calls Nunn’s ‘hormic theory
T>f action.’ The explanation of this fact is that t here are three distinc t
p roblems in the discussion of which the term ‘mechanism ’ or ‘mechan¬
istic conception’ is used in three different senses. The firs t is the purely
metaphysical problem of determinism or contingence, in which the
determinist opinion is often called ‘mechanist.’ This problem concerns
the whole universe, and therefore no decision in favour either of deter¬
minism or of contingence affects the relation between themselves of any
parts of the universe'more than any other parts. The second is the prob¬
lem of‘vitalism’ or ‘mechanism’ in the behaviour of living organisms.

Ch.i PSYCHOLOGY AND THOUGHT 39

If the curriculum of our municipal schools also in¬
cluded some instruction in the past history of the evolu¬
tion of living organisms, the difference between the
‘hormic’ and the ‘mechanist’ conceptions of intelligent

That problem was w r el l stated by Prof. T. S. H aldane in his presidential
address to the Physiological Section of the British Association (1908).
He there asked whether the characteristic i nternal and external move¬
men ts of a living cell are due entirel y (as Loeb, for instance, contends)
to chemical and physical forces, ox (as Haldane himself contends) toa
general purposiveness in the behaviour of living organisms which is not
comparable with, and does not interact with the chemical and physical
forces. In the discussion of this second problem Loeb’s contention is
often called ‘mechanist.’ The third prob lem is the much more limited
question which I discuss above. In the case of man and th e other
higher mammals, have the functions of the upper brain any initiative ox
‘drive’ of their own (as Myers and Nunn contend), or are they entirely
de penden t (as MacDougall, MacCurdy, and others contend) on the
‘drive’ of‘instincts’ arising in the lower brain? I have called MacDou-
gall’s answer to this third problem ‘mechanist.’ The clearest statement
of that answer appeared originally in his well-knowm Social Psychology
(1908), p. 44, and is repeated in his Outline of Psychology (1923), p.
218: ‘The instincts are the prime movers of all human activity; by the
conative or impulsive force of some instinct, every train of thought,
however cold and passionless it may seem, is borne along towards its
end ... all the complex intellectual apparatus of the most highly devel¬
oped mind is but the instrument by which these impulses seek their
satisfaction. ... Take away these instinctive dispositions with their
powerful impulses, and the organism would become incapable of activ¬
ity of any kind; it would be inert and motionless, like a wonderful clock¬
work whose mainspring had been removed, or a steam engine whose
fires had been drawn.’ Professor Mac Doug all is not, I believe, a Marx¬
ist; but as long as he continues to reproduce this passage, lie will be
quoted by Marxists all over the world in support of their plea for the
necessary subordination of reason to passion.

4 °

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. i

action could be made clearer by using, as Dr. Head does
in the passage quoted above, evolutionary language.
The human body is built up of cells, and every human
being comes into existence by the repeated splitting of
a single-celled fertilized ovum, thereby repeating in
outline the evolutionary history of his species. The
world contains both single-celled and many-celled
animals; and we can, by arranging them in order of
complexity and success in cell-co-ordination, trace an
unbroken series from the loosely co-operating single-
celled protozoa to the highly unified many-celled human
organism.

In such a series the simplest form of co-operation be¬
tween cells might be represented by a group of single-
celled marine protozoa, retaining their individuality
except that they are embedded in a common jelly-mass
which is propelled through the water by the simultan¬
eous action of their whip-like ‘flagella.’ Next in succes¬
sion might come such ‘colonies’ as those of the coral-
protozoa, where the tissues of the members of the
‘colony’ are continuously connected with each other,
but where each ‘individual’ (if one may still use the
word) is similar in structure to the rest, and follows
with independent but roughly co-ordinated variations,
a similar behaviour-pattern. Later in the series would
come the innumerable species of true metazoa (from
the flat-worms to man), in which the structure of the
cells of skin and viscera and nerves and bone is so
specialized as to fit each of them for the performance of
different functions in the life of the organism; and in

Ch. I PSYCHOLOGY AND THOUGHT 41

which the behaviour of each part of the organism,
though still retaining traces of its ancient independence,
is subordinated with an enormously greater degree of
success to the behaviour of the organism as a whole. 1

The history, however, of the Russian attempt to
found a complete scientific art of thought upon the
‘mechanist’ conception should be a warning to us not, in
the present state of physiological knowledge, to make an
equally confident use of the ‘hormic’ conception. The
Russians and their followers reject on a priori grounds
some of the plainest facts of history, and deny the exist¬
ence of some of the most important elements in their
own mental experience. Those who prefer the ‘hormic’
conception should for the present be content if it helps
them to see more clearly certain observable facts of
human intellectual behaviour which the use of mechanist
language tends to obscure. One of these facts is that,
although what I have called (p. 30) the primitive cycle
of psychological events in rational behaviour is carried
through with greater vigour and ease than any less
primitive course — although when sensation leads at
once to impulse, impulse to thought, and thought back
again to impulse and muscular action, we are often more
intensely alive than when associative thought begins
without sensation, or without an impulse from the lower
nerve-centres, or when thought ends without action or
the impulse to act — yet that cycle is not the only pos¬
sible, nor always, for the purposes of the thinker, the

1 See E. P. Mumford on ‘The Conception of Individuality in Bio¬
logy’ (Science Progress , July, 1925).

42

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. i

most effective cycle. The cortex of the upper brai n
may, for instance, of its own initiative, to satis fy its own

need of activity, and to carry out its own function in the
organism as a whole, start the process of thought with¬
out waiting for the primitive stimulus of a sensation.
When Lord Shaftesbury, in his diary for 18^4, wrote
o ne day , ‘Very busy; little time for thought; none for
reading. Oftentimes do I look at a book and long foL.it
as a d onke y for a carro t; and I, like him, am disap¬
pointed;’ 1 he was describing an impulse to think which
was started by the visual sensation of a book, and which
owed part of its vigour to that fact. But if Lord
Shaftesbury had been compelled to live in a house
where he never saw a book, his brain would still, with¬
out any appropriate preliminary sensation, have
asserted its need to think.

Thought, again, may start, not only without the
primitive stimulus of a s ensation, but also without the
intermediate stimulus of an ‘instinctive’ impulse from

the lower brain. Though a train of mental association
may be vigorously driven from link to link by envy of a
rival, or pity for a sufferer, it may also start without the
aid of an instinctive impulse, and may gain vigour as it
proceeds. And just as the upper brain may start it s
a ctivity without the stimulus of a sensation or an ‘in ¬
s tinctive’ impulse , so it may conclude its activity with ¬
out having produced that muscular movement which
concludes the ‘primitive’ cycle of psychological events. 2

1 Hammond, J. L. and B., Lord Shaftesbury (1923), p. 128.

2 See MacDougall, Outline of Psychology (1923), p. 289. ‘In animals

Ch. i PSYCHOLOGY AND THOUGHT 43

A train of thought may die away without any recogniz-
able external result of any kind . When Archimede s in¬
vented his test of specific gravity, he ran into the street
and shouted; but in the preceding twelve months he
must have done a good deal of thinking that left his
muscles passive. Dr. J. B. Watson, it is true, and his
followers say that any thought of a chess-player which
does not cause his hand to move towards the pieces
does cause his internal or external speech-organs to
move — or rather actually consists of such movements,
though they may be both invisible and inaudible. 1
But Dr. Watson’s only proof that his belief is true
is apparently the circular argument that if it were
not true the extreme behaviourist dogma would be
unsound.

And the various factors whose co-operation makes up
the primitive cycle of intelligent action can not only
‘short circuit’ that cycle by sometimes providing their
own drive, but can to some extent overlap each others’
functions, and like the actors in a stock company, play
each others’ parts. K. S. Lashley has proved that a rat
normally acquires the visual habit of finding its way
about a maze by using the occipital part of its cortex;
but that, when the occipital part is removed, it can re¬
learn the habit (in about the same number of minutes)

and primitively in man every cycle of mental activity expresses itself in
the bodily behaviour which is the natural outcome of all conation.’

1 ‘We do not admit [reasoning] as a genuine type of human behavior
except as a special form of language habit.’ Watson, Behavior (1914),
p. 319.

44

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. i

by using another part of its cortex. 1 In the same way,
human beings can, apparently, use different proportions
of the cortical and non-cortical elements in their central
nervous system, while performing what seem to be
identical operations. I was, myself, a rather precocious
and extremely unmusical small boy. At the age of five
I learnt to play The Blue Bells of Scotland on the piano,
by a process which I can remember well, and believe to
have been entirely ‘cortical.’ Some of my sisters, by
making more use of the more ancient parts 2 of their
nervous systems, learnt to play with infinitely less corti¬
cal activity, and with very different effects upon their
hearers.

I am often reminded by these facts of the British
Constitution, which it has been part of my professional
duty to study. That Constitution has been evolved
owing to the need of unifying the social actions of the
forty-three million inhabitants of Great Britain. It, like
the human nervous system, consists of newer structures
superposed upon older, in such a way as to produce
both the defect of overlapping, and the compensating

1 Psychobiology, 2, p. 55(1920), and Journal of Comparative Psych¬
ology, 1, p. 453 (1921), and American Journal of Physiology, 59, p. 44
(1922). Owing, I am told, to a peculiarly indefensible application of
the post-war ‘axe,’ none of these journals are in the British Museum
Library. I have to thank Dr. E. D. Adrian of Cambridge for the refer¬
ences.

2 Presidential address of Sir Charles Sherrington to the British As¬
sociation, 1922: ‘the chief, perhaps the sole seat [of mentality] is a com¬
paratively modern nervous structure superposed on the non-mental
and more ancient other parts’ [of the nervous system].

Ch. i PSYCHOLOGY AND THOUGHT 45

advantage of elasticity. The oldest part of our Consti¬
tution provides that we shall be governed by our king,
whom God has caused to be born from his father, and
who has been anointed in Westminster Abbey by our
chief priest. The king still chooses his ministers, as he
did when he was the only source of authority. Before
the king, on the advice of his ministers, directs his
sheriff to hang or imprison a man, he makes use of an
almost equally old system, trial by jury. Twelve peers
of the prisoner, chosen by the supernatural indication of
the lot, are sworn to tell the truth about him by oaths
which bring them into danger of supernatural penalties.
On these older parts has been superposed a newer
system, which provides that we shall be governed by a
Parliament, elected by the men and women on the regis¬
ter, and acting through ministers responsible to it. On
Parliament itself has been superposed a still more recent
system, in which the main work of government is done
by civil servants and military officers chosen by com¬
petitive examination, and by professional judges and
magistrates chosen by the ministers but exercising inde¬
pendent authority.

Many constitutional text-books have been written in
which all these facts are represented as a neatly dove¬
tailed mechanical arrangement, in which each decision
is taken by an undisputed appropriate authority, and no
question is left undecided. But a British politician who
determined to act on that conception would certainly
be a political failure. He could only succeed by remem¬
bering that the relation between the parts of our Consti-

4 6 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. t

tution is never simple, and is constantly changing. A
certain degree of responsibility of the ministers to the
monarch persists, and influences the working of their
responsibility to Parliament. In time of war the control
of Parliament over the civil executive and the army may
be almost completely suspended, and the Commander-
in-Chief may refuse to tell his plans to the Secretary for
War. No one knows whether the next English bishop
will really be chosen by the prime minister, or by the
king, or by the Archbishop of Canterbury, or by a
subtle balance between authorities each of which is
in its origin and on its own principles supreme. And
if one authority, from ill-health or incompetence or
some external crisis, ceases to function, another silently
takes its place.

I n Britain, therefore, the art of gove rnment is not

that mechanical process of driving an inert machine by

the force of a single sovereign wil l, of which rulers like

Lenin and Mussolini constantly dream , but the delicate
talk of co-ordinating the actions of partially indepen¬
dent living organisms. And all the psychological and
physiological arts by which unity of action is to some
degree secured within the individual human organism
are of this type. Mr. Harry Vardon, for instance, in his
book How to -play Golf (1912), says (p. 62) that after a
year of constant experimentation he discovered a grip
which ‘seems to create just the right fusion between the
hands, and involuntarily induces each to do its proper
work.’ Mr. Vardon’s language would not perhaps
satisfy exact psychological analysis, but he has the root

Ch. I PSYCHOLOGY AND THOUGHT 47

of the matter in him. By his use of the words ‘fusion’
and ‘involuntarily’ he means that he has at last ac¬
quired an art which enables him, when he grips his
brassy, to unify the behaviour of certain partially inde¬
pendent elements in his organism; and the thinker who
is about to grip his problem has to acquire a similar art.

II

CONSCIOUSNESS AND WILL

But the thinker who desires to get help in the practice
of his art from the science of psychology should not be
content to avoid the hindrances which arise from the
hasty generalizations of some modern psychologists.
He should also, I believe, t ry to rid himself of that
‘commonsense’ notion of his conscious self as a com¬
pletely integrated unity which he will have formed
before he ever heard that a science of psychology exists.
Mr. Harry Vardon, when he is practising a new grip,
does not, unless he has been reading MacDougall’s
Social Psychology or the Plebs text-book, believe that
his instincts and his intelligence have to each other the
simple relation of power and machine. He finds that
he is not successful unless he recognizes more or less
clearly that his hands, wrists, eyes, nerves, feelings, and
ideas all have ‘power’ of their own; and that, if he is to
achieve that measure of harmonious organic co-opera¬
tion on which excellence in golf depends, he must act on
the assumption that in that respect he can only hope
to improve an imperfect tendency towards unification.
But he will nevertheless assume that he himself, the
essential Harry, the person who wills to improve his
grip, and is conscious that he wills it, the person who
looks out every morning through the eyes in his shaving
mirror, is a simple unity.

That assumption will not hurt Mr. Vardon’s golf;

4S

Ch. 2 CONSCIOUSNESS AND WILL 49

but the professed thinker, if he is to control some of the
most important elements in his intellectual processes,
must so far get behind his own commonsense as to sub¬
s titute _an explicit conception of his conscious self~as an
imperfect and improvable tendency towards unity for @

the tacit assumption that his conscious self is an already

completed uni ty. In order to do so, he should begin
by forcing himself to realize the existence of an un¬
broken series of grades from unconsciousness up to the
highest level of consciousness which man has yet
reached. We can, for instance, watch the g rowth and
decay in our own lives of our own personal conscions-
ness. Memory seems to us to be an essential element in
consciousness, and if the consciousness of any one
moment is not joined to the consciousness of the follow¬
ing and preceding moments, we can hardly conceive of
it as consciousness at all. Yet our memory of con¬
sciousness goes back, perhaps, only to the end of our
third year; and if we watch a laughing child of one
year old, we cannot help believing that vivid conscious¬
ness must there exist without continuous memory. Nor
can we draw a line at any point between consciousness
at the age of one, and consciousness or quasi-conscious¬
ness immediately after, or even immediately before
birth, or fix a point in the growth of the human embryo
where potential quasi-consciousness turns into actual
quasi-consciousness. Nor, in the non-human world, can
we draw a line between the apparently intense con¬
sciousness of a fox terrier or a lark, and the quasi¬
consciousness of a newly-born puppy or of a fish or

D

Ch. 2

50 THE ART OF THOUGHT

worm. At the end of life, we can draw no line between
the second childhood of extreme old age, the quasi-con¬
sciousness of delirium, the unconsciousness of coma or
of functional death, and the non-consciousness of irre¬
vocable death. 1 At least once every twenty-four ho urs
we pass through all the grades from consciousness
t hrough foreconsciousness to unc onsciousness, white
going to sleep, and back again while waking u p. We
are further becoming aware that consciousness not only
may be graded on a single series from complete uncon¬
sciousness to the highest grade of consciousness yet
reached, but also may exist in forms parallel to that
series. Hypnotists and psychiatrists have, for instance,
proved that in the same person there may be, either
successively or simultaneously, two or more ‘dissoci¬
ated consciousnesses/ or ‘co-consciousnesses/ 2

C onsciousness, indeed, shows all the signs of having
reached, as yet, only an early, imperfect, and confused

1 In this case, as in the case of most graded psychological and bio¬
logical facts, we are hindered in thinking or writing . clearly hy..thfi de¬
fects of our vocabulary. We have hardly any words expr_essing_gr&lgg
in consciousness. AH that psychologists have yet done is to name two

Extremes, ‘consciousness* andAmconsciousness,’ and to insert between

them a single vaguely conceived intermediate grade called ‘subcon¬
sciousness,’ or (in Freudian language) ‘foreconsciousness.’

2 One may be helped to avoid the ‘common-sense’ assumption that
consciousness is necessarily absolute and necessarily individual by trying
to imagine other kinds of consciousness than our own, say, in the tem¬
perate latitudes of the planet Mars. There may there, perhaps, be acres
or square miles of confluent protoplasm, in which consciousness exists,

| but i s no more permanently individualized than are the wave-shapes of
1 t he se a or the life-shapes in the Buddhist universe.

Ch. 2 CONSCIOUSNESS AND WILL 51

st age in its evolution . The distribution, for instance, of
consciousness over the physiological and psychological
events which make up our daily life is strangely arbi¬
trary. Every conscious dv^nt can have analogues be¬
neath the level of consciousness. We can unconsciously,
or foreconsciously, or co-consciously, experience events
which, if they were fully conscious, we should call sen¬
sations, or perceptions, or impulses, or thoughts; and
in every grade of consciousness we can move our limbs,
or compose poems, or discover mathematical solutions.
We are, as a rule, unaware of this fact, because we
either do not observe or soon forget all mental events
outside the limits of full consciousness. In the case of
mental events which are so far removed from full con¬
sciousness as to be called ‘unconscious,’ we can only
observe them by hypnotism, ‘free association,’ or some
other method of tapping the unconscious memory after
the mental event has occurred. In the case of less com¬
plete defect of consciousness, we can sometimes observe
a foreconscious event while it is going on. In explain¬
ing how we can do this, psychologists find it convenient
to use terms drawn from the facts of eyesight. The
‘field of vision’ of our eyes consists of a small circle of ^
full or ‘focal’ vision, surrounded by an irregular area of
‘peripheral’ vision, which is increasingly vague and im¬
perfect as the limit of vision is neared. We are usually
unaware of the existence of our peripheral vision, be¬
cause as soon as .anything interesting presents itself
there we have a strong natural tendency to turn the
focus of vision in its direction. We can, however, by a

Ch.2

52 THE ART OF THOUGHT

rather severe effort, inhibit that tendency, and so
observe objects in our peripheral field of vision. Using
these terms, we can say that one reason why we tend to
ignore the mental events in our ‘peripheral’ conscious¬
ness is that we have a strong tendency to bring them
into ‘focal’ consciousness as soon as they are interesting
to us, but that we can sometimes by a severe effort keep
them in the periphery of consciousness, and there
t observe them.

Closely allied to the problem of our working concep¬
tion of consciousness is the problem of our working
conception of will. Just as consciousness shades imper¬
ceptibly from full consciousness through forecon¬
sciousness to the apparent non-consciousness of the
simplest animal behaviour, and from unified conscious¬
ness to completely or partially dissociated ‘co-conscious¬
ness,’ so full volition_shades imperceptibly, through
what I may call ‘fore-volition,’ to the apparent non¬
volition or automatism of the simplest animal behaviour;
and, on another line of gradation, from unified volition
to that dissociated volition which I may call ‘co-voli¬
tion.’ It is, indeed, a delicate question of verbal defini¬
tion both at what point we shall cease to give the name
‘will’ to the less continuous and less unified forms of
conscious conation (whether we shall, for instance, say
that an excited dog wills to dig at a rabbit-hole, or a
hungry infant wills to scream), and at what point in an
equally imperceptible gradation we shall distinguish
between conscious conation itself and the mere ‘urge’
of the simplest forms of protozoal and cellular life.

Ch. 2 CONSCIOUSNESS AND WILL 53

Even the trained, comparatively unified, and continu¬
ous will of an educated civilized man shares that quality
of incompleteness and arbitrariness which appears in
the analysis both of consciousness, and of the co-ordina¬
tion (which I discussed in Chapter I) of all the factors
of organic life. An unconscious desire may, for in¬
stance, mask itself as a conscious will, whose character
gives us little or no hint of the underlying process.
And an equal arbitrariness characterizes the limits of
the control of our will over our external and internal
behaviour. If we decide to perform such a bodily act
as taking up a book, or walking in this or that direction,
we do so, if we are in good health, with such easy and
complete control that the will to act and the act itself
almost seem to be the same event. We can with equally
complete control direct and focus our sight, or move
our tongue. Few people can, however, by the most
intense effort of will, influence appreciably the rate of
their pulse, or the process of digestion, or the functions
of their thyroid, or suprarenal, or even lacrymal glands;
and in some cases the effort of will is a positive hin-j
drance to the production of the desired events. 1

The same is true of those of our activities which ,
without dogmatizing as to the ultimate relation between
body and mind, we may call ‘mental.’ The mental pro¬
cess of attention is, for instance, like the related bodily
act of eye-focussing, very completely controllable by
our will; and, indeed, the development of the will itself

1 See e.g. Baudouin, Autosuggestion (2nd English edition, 1924), p.
37: ‘I n a word , the more we wish, the less are we able.’

Ch. 2

54 THE ART OF THOUGHT

may, on its physiological side, have been closely related
to the development of attention. On t he oth er hand,
our feelings are very little under the control of our will.
We cannot by a direct effort of will make sure of feeling
happy, or sorry, or angry, or grateful, at any given
moment, or in any particular situation. It is easy for
us, again, to learn voluntarily ‘by heart,’ while making
repeated acts of attention combined with the formation
of silent speech-images; and we can often by a single
effort of will remember a name which we have for¬
gotten, or find the answer to a simple problem. But the
mental processes which constitute the higher forms of
thought, and which lead to the formation of new and
useful ideas or decisions by distant and unaccustomed
links of association, are very imperfectly controllable by
any direct effort of will. The most perfectly trained
scientist or poet can no more be sure that he will be ab]e
to make his mind produce the solution of a complex
problem, or a new poetical image or cadence, or a ready
original sonnet on the death of a monarch or a presi¬
dent, than can the most perfectly trained clergyman be
sure that he will feel really sad at Tuesday’s funeral
s or really joyful at Thursday’s wedding. It is this fact
which leads to such pessimistic statements about the
impossibility of improving thought by conscious art as
that which I have already quoted from Pillsbury. 1 If
our will is un able to control the more important pro-
cesses of thought, an art of thought cannot exist.

T his was the problem which constantly torment ed

1 See above, p. 29.

Ch.2 CONSCIOUSNESS AND WILL 55

Plato. The whole universe was to Plato only intelligible
if it was seen as an imperfect expres sion of a divine,
moral idea; and Plato’s favourite illustration of moral
conduct was the voluntary subordination of the crafts¬
man’s skill to the craftsman’s conscious purpose. But
conscious purpose seemed to Plato to have surprisingly
little connection with the production of poetry, or with
t he other highest achievements of the hu man mind .

Plato himself was a great poet, with ample personal
experience of poetic inspiration; and he lived in Athens
at the close of the greatest poetic outburst that the
world has ever seen. He was also, as far as his love for
truth would allow him, a religious conservative, who
hoped to see a moral direction for the distracted city-
states of Greece develop out of the trance-utterances of
the Delphic oracle. But neither the Athenian poets nor
the Delphic priestess (who, when awakened from her
trance, might be a very uninteresting person) could, he
found, give any account, in terms of conscious volition,
of the processes by which their ideas came to them. In
the Re-public Plato tried to solve the resulting practical
problem by forbidding, throughout his ideal state, all
poetry except ‘hymns to the gods and panegyrics on
good men .’ 1 In the Pliadrus, he put forward a half-
serious, half-ironical theory that creative thought was a
kind of madness, sent upon men by the gods in accor¬
dance with some purpose of which the gods and not
men were conscious. The Greek words for insanity and
inspiration (manike and mantike) were, he suggested,

1 Republic, p. 607.

jlKA.dAt***'

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch.2

56

derived from the same root. ‘We_Grgsks,’ he said, ‘owe
our greatest blessings to heaven-sent madness. For the
prophetess at Delphi and the priestesses at Dodona
have in their moments of madness done great and glori¬
ous service to the men and cities of Greece, but little
or none in their sober mood .’ 1 There is a deeper irony
in his description of the ‘madness inspired by the
Muses,’ ‘ which seizes upon the tender and virgin soul’
of the poet, and distinguishes him from that industrious
apprentice to the art of letters, whom Plato the poet, in
spite of the theories of Plato the moralist, cannot help
despising. ‘He who having no touch of the Muses’
madness in his soul comes to the door, and thinks that
he will get into the temple by the help of art, he, I
say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man is
nowhere at all when he enters into rivalry with the
madman .’ 2

Indeed, throughout the whole phenomena of con-
sciousriess. will, and life , we see the same puzzling
tendency towards unity, limited by the same kinds of
imperfection. This fact is apt to make not only a non¬
physiologist like myself, but some of the best modern
physiologists wonder whether physiology may not ulti¬
mately give us a working conception of consciousness,
will, and life as being the same thing. Professor Julian
Huxley, for instance, expresses his belief ‘that some¬
thing of the same general nature as mind in ourselves

1 Phadrus, 244. See also F. C. Prescott, The Poetic Mind (1922),
p. 294.

2 Phadrus, 245.

Ch.2 CONSCIOUSNESS AND WILL 57

is inherent in all life, something standing in the same
relation to living matter in general as our minds do to
the particular living matter of our brains’ ( Essays of a
Biologist (1923), p. 242). An unbridged gulf still, it is
true, exists between our conceptions of life and non¬
life, of the behaviour of the atoms that are building up
the most complex crystal, and of those which are build¬
ing up, from its original germ, the simplest living cell.
But there seems to be a tendency (strengthened by
recent work on atomic structure and movement) topass
over that gap, not b y extending, as Loeb a nd Watson
have don e, our conception s of non-life to life, but by ^
extending our conceptions of life to non-life. Professor
1 7 S. Haldan e, for instance, writing as a physiologist,
says ‘it is at least evident that the extension of biological
conceptions to the whole of nature may be much nearer
than seemed conceivable a few yearsjtgo’ (Mechanism,
Life and Personality (1921), p. 101); ‘We cannot re¬
solve life into mechanism, but behind what we at pre¬
sent interpret as physical and chemical mechanism life
may be hidden for all we yet know’ (Mechanism, Life and
Personality , p. 143); and ‘That a meeting-point between
biology and physical science may at some time be found
there is no reason for doubting. But we may confi¬
dently predict that if that meeting-point is found, and
one of the two sciences is swallowed up, that one will
not be biology’ (The New Physiology, 1919, p. 19). Pro¬
fessor A. S. Eddington, again, wrote as a mathematical
physicist in 1920 that ‘all through the physical world
runs that unknown content, which must surely be the

Ch. 2

58 THE ART OF THOUGHT

stuff of our consciousness’ {Space, Time and Gravitation ,
p. 200). And, in the same way, it is becoming increas¬
ingly difficult for a psychologist to maintain the dis¬
tinction between his conceptions of ‘body’ and of
‘mind.’ If we are compelled by thousands of years of
tradition still to use the old words, we must at least say
with Dr. Henry Head that ‘mind and body habitually
respond together to external or internal events,’ 1 and
with Watson, ‘a whole man thinks with his whole body
in each and every part.’ 2 But I myself find that the
nearer I get to the statement t hat body and mind are
two aspects of one life, the greater is my sense of reality.
And Donne comes very near that statement in the mag¬
nificent lines in which he describes a blushing girl:

‘Her pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought
That one might almost say her body thought.’ 3

1 Oxford Psychological Congress, 1923, p. 180.

2 British Journal of Psychology , Oct., 1920, p. 88.

3 An Anatomy of the World , line 244—Donne’s Poems (Bullen, Vol.

n, p. 135)-

Ill

THOUGHT BEFORE ART

The art of though t, like the art of running, or the
actor’s art of significant gesture, i s an attempt to im¬
prove by conscious effort an already existing form of
human behaviour. Men ran for countless generations,

before they invented or handed down t he few expedi¬
ents which constitute the art of running as taught by.
professional athletic trainer s; they revealed their feel¬
ings by gestures long before there were any schools of
dramatic art; and they thought for thousands of years
before they had a name for thinking. In all these cases,
therefore, the rules of art must be based on the most
exact knowledge which we can obtain of the behaviour
which the art is to modify. Sometimes that behaviour
is completely ‘natural’; the teacher, for instance, of
running, or of breathing-exercises, starts from behaviour
which is mainly directed by the sympathetic nervous
system, and which contains hardly any ‘acquired’
elements. But when the co-operation of the higher
nervous system is involved, it is, under the conditions of
modern civilization, almost impossible to observe any
instance of human behaviour which is entirely free, and
extremely difficult to observe any instance which is even
approximately free from acquired elements. Many, in¬
deed, of the innate tendencies of the higher nervous
system, such as the tendency to speak, represent rather
a power and an inclination to learn to behave in a cer-

59

6 o

THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. 3

tain way, than a direct instinct to behave in that way.
Such learning may proceed rather by half-conscious
imitation than by conscious effort; and the result even
of repeated conscious effort may be a habit which it is
not easy for an observer either of his own or of other
people’s behaviour to distinguish from a natural ten¬
dency.

An actor, for instance, can only with the greatest
difficulty form any estimate as to how far his move¬
ments while he acts are ‘natural,’ and how far they are
due to acquired modifications of nature. Sometimes he
can be helped by observing the gestures of less sophisti¬
cated persons than himself; he can watch the behaviour
of children; and he could, before the cinema had soaked
whole populations in third-rate theatrical conventions,
go down to the East End of London on a Saturday
night, and watch the comparatively natural behaviour
of uneducated people who were under the influence of
rage or jealousy, and some of whose acquired social
habits had been temporarily weakened by alcohol. Or
he may try to recall his own behaviour on some occasion
when he was ‘off his guard’; or, if he has unusual powers
of imagination, introspection and inhibition, he may
stand before a looking-glass trying to believe that he is
Othello or Lear, and to inhibit all acquired elements in
the gestures which follow from that belief.

The thinker, when he is trying to observe thought in
its most natural form, is faced with even greater diffi¬
culties than the actor who is trying to observe natural
gesture. Some of the most important steps in the pro-

6 i

Ch. 3 THOUGHT BEFORE ART

cess of thought are normally unconscious or half-con¬
scious; and our unconscious or half-conscious thought,
even if we succeed in observing it, is not necessarily
‘natural.’ The subject-matter, again, even of our least
conscious thought is mainly derived from past experi¬
ence, and is deeply influenced by intellectual and
emotional habits; and thought at all grades of con¬
sciousness makes large use of language with its innum¬
erable acquired associations. The student, therefore, of
the art of thought has to choose a more or less arbitrary
point from which he shall assume the conscious effort of
the art to begin. I myself shall, in this and the following
six chapters of my book, assume that I am addressing
young adults who have already learnt, at home or at
school, to speak, read, attend, and memorize, but who,
though they do in fact constantly reach new ideas by
using their brains, have never yet attempted to acquire
or to apply a conscious art of thought. I shall post¬
pone till the last three chapters of the book the problem
of that preliminary training in the art of thought which
may be given by teachers and others to children and
adolescents.

The young adults whom I imagine myself to be
addressing will, in spite of differences in their acquired
experience, be alike in that the esse n tial el ementin their
inventive thou ght is the process fa y which, as I have
already stated, o ne psychological event calls up ano ther
in the ‘telephone^ ex change’ of the upper brain . It_is
t his process of ‘association’ whichtheir art will attempt
to improve^ and which they must first try to observe and

62 THE ART OF THOUGHT ' Ch. 3

understand. The process of association has been ob¬
served introspectively by two methods - the observer
has either remembered a train of association after it has
occurred, or he has watched it while it is occurring.
The first method is by far the easier, and up till our own
time has been almost exclusively used. Aristotle, in¬
deed, in the earliest recorded discussion of the associa¬
tion-process, treats association as a section of the prob¬
lem of memory. He asks himself why the memory of
one experience calls up the memory of another. ‘For,’
he says, ‘experiences habitually follow one another, this
succeeding that, and so, when a person wishes to recol¬
lect, he will endeavour to find some initial experience to
which the one in question succeeded.’ 1 He concludes
that experiences call each other up, sometimes because
they succeeded each other in time, sometimes because
the experiences were similar, or contiguous in place, or
were connected logically as are the steps in a mathe¬
matical proof.

The best-known description of a train of association
as seen in memory is that given by Hobbes in a classical
passage of his Leviathan (Chapter III, written about
1650). The passage forms part of a discussion of the
type of thinking which Hobbes calls a ‘train of thoughts,
or mental discourse . . . “unguided,” “without de¬
sign and inconstant.’ ‘And yet,’ he says, ‘in this wild
ranging of the mind, a man may ofttimes perceive the

1 Aristotle, De Memoria, II, 12. This difficult passage has been
admirably translated and explained by Prof. Howard C. Warren in his
History oj the Association Psychology (1921), pp. 25 and 26.

Ch. 3 THOUGHT BEFORE ART 63

way of it, and the dependence of one thought upon
another. For in a discourse of our present civil war,
what could seem more impertinent, than to ask, as one
did, what was the value of a Roman penny? Yet the
coherence to me was manifest enough. For the thought
of the war introduced the thought of delivering up the
king to his enemies; the thought of that brought in the
thought of the delivering up of Christ; and that again
the thought of the thirty pence, which was the price of
that treason; and thence easily followed that malicious
question; and all this in a moment of time; for thought
is quick.’ In his explanation of the connection between
link and link in such a train Hobbe s is here less full
than Aristotle, and confines himself to succession in
time — ‘i n the imagining of anyt hing,’ he says, ‘ there is
no certainty what wc shall imagine next; only this is cer¬
tain, i t shall be something that succee ded the same
before, at one tim e or another.’

In these passages, neither Aristotle nor Hobbes dis¬
tinguishes between the relation to each other of psycho¬
logical events, and the relation to each other of the
external facts which give rise to the psychological events.
The likeness between the treachery of Judas and the
treachery of the Scottish leaders seemed a sufficient ex¬
planation of the calling up of one by the other, without
asking why the mind of the speaker was interested, even
during ‘unguided’ thought, in that kind of likeness.
This over-simplification of the problem was made
easier by the fact that neither Aristotle nor Hobbes
recognized the existence of psychological causes which

64 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. 3

were not conscious. And the over-simplification was
increased when, after the publication of Locke’s Essay
Concerning Human Understanding in 1690, psycholo¬
gists came to use the term ‘The Association of Ideas’
for the whole association process, and to define ‘ideas’
as copies, in conscious memory, of events. 1

Hobbes himself, however, realized that the path of
association might in some cases be directed, not merely
by the external connection between remembered facts,
but also by the drive of passion in the thinker himself.
These cases he classed as ‘regulated’ thought. ‘For the
impression,’ he says in the same chapter, ‘made by such
things as we desire, or fear, is strong, and permanent,
or, if it cease for a time, of quick return; so strong it is
sometimes, as to hinder and break our sleep. From
desire, ariseth the thought of some means we have seen
produce the like of that which we aim at; and from the
thought of that, the thought of means to that mean; and
so continually, till we come to some beginning within
our own power. And because the end, by the greatness
of the impression, comes often to mind, in case our
thoughts begin to wander, they are quickly again re¬
duced into the way.’ And, as I pointed out in Chapter I,

1 Professor H. C. Warren points out ( History of the Association Psy¬
chology, p. 5) that: ‘When Locke speaks of the association of ideas he has
reference to possible connections between all sorts of mental content ;
whereas from the time of David Hume onward the phrase refers to con¬
nections between representative data only. . . . This permanent fixing
of the expression association of ideas with an altered meaning given to
the term idea has exerted some influence on the development of the
doctrine itself.’

Ch. 3 THOUGHT BEFORE ART 65

many modern psychologists have tended to simplify
the problem in another way, by treating Hobbes’s
special class as universal, and by declaring that the
mechanical drive of some one of a list of instincts is*"^
invariably requisite before connection can be made
between one link of association and another.

The second method of observation, in which the ob¬
server watches the association-process while it is going
on, instead of remembering and explaining it when it is
past, is much the more difficult; but it is much less
likely (if the observer can prevent himself from distort¬
ing his observations by theories as to their causes) to
lead to an over-simplified conception of the association-
process itself. Fifty years hence, students will have an
ample supply of this kind of observation before them ;
but for the moment the supply which I have been able
to discover is curiously small. The experimental associa¬
tion-trains which are deliberately started and observed
in psychological laboratories are limited in range, and
are often distorted by the ‘unnatural’ conditions of their
formation; and the clinical observations recorded by the
professional psycho-analysts seem to me to lose most of
their evidential value owing to the influence of the sug¬
gestion of the psycho-analyst upon his patients, and to
his own conscious or sub-conscious determination to^-
defend, against outside critics, the dogmas of his pro¬
fession. The most useful (from the point of view of the
would-be thinker) of modern introspective evidence on
the ‘natural’ association-process, which I have met with,
is that contained in Dr. J. Varendon ck’s Psychology, of.

E

66

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. 3

Day Dreams , written by himself in English, and pub¬
lished in 1921. Dr. Yarendonck, who was attached as
an interpreter to the British army in Belgium, was,
before the war, a lecturer on pedagogic psychology.
During the war he trained himself to observe, night
after night, the ‘foreconscious’ events in his mind which
immediately preceded sleep, and which were not initi¬
ated or controlled by any conscious effort of will. He
was able both to watch these trains of thought, which he
calls day-dreams, without allowing them to be in¬
fluenced by the fact that they were being watched, and
also at the right moment to wake himself, by a strong
effort, into complete consciousness, and record his
observations. His day-dreams deal mainly with the
hopes and fears and annoyances of camp life; and they
are set down with a courage and candour which compel
the admiration of anyone who has tried, as I have, to do
the same thing, and who, partly from want of equal
courage, has failed. Varendonck’s first observation was
that ‘there occur in most of our day-dreams risings and
fallings’ (p. 176), or ‘successive risings to the surface and
sinkings into the unconscious’ (p. 155). A day-dream,
he says, may last for a considerable time, and during that
time, several such ‘risings and fallings’ of consciousness
may take place, before the process is interrupted either
by sleep or by a return to complete consciousness.
He gives (pp. 170—2) a description, written down imme¬
diately after its conclusion, of a day-dream which lasted
fifty-five minutes, and in which ‘on six different occa¬
sions the association had risen close to consciousness.’

THOUGHT BEFORE ART

67

Ch. 3

Varendonck carefully analyses a few of his longer
day-dreams, or, as he sometimes calls them, in Freudian
language, ‘phantasies .’ The most interesting for our
purpose belonged to the type which is often called
‘mental trial and error’; that is to say they were part of
an automatic mental attempt to solve a difficulty by
imagining successive solutions. And just as the muscu¬
lar ‘trial and error’ process comes to its conclusion when
some one among a series of movements is successful, so
the ‘mental trial and error’ process found, in Varen-
donck’s case, its normal conclusion in t he mental recog¬
n ition that the solution thought of would he successful
if trie d. I n thinking of this recognition I find that I
t end to use the word ‘click ,’ in the slang sense common
among English school-boys and soldiers. This term
spread during the war, when every young soldier was
being trained to use, by a process containing a large
element of muscular ‘trial and error,’ a number of
machines from rifle-locks upwards. The ‘click’ was the
sound made by the machine when the successful move¬
ment was made, and the verb ‘to click’ meant, for in¬
stance, to succeed in such matters as obtaining by verbal
ingenuity an irregular week’s leave. In its origin, the
click feeling must have been due to the fact that a fore¬
conscious or unconscious train of association had led to
a point which revealed the need of action, and therefore
the need of full consciousness. It is the same thing
as the extremely painful shock which occurs when
a casual train of association suddenly reveals to us
that we are on the point of missing an important

68

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. 3

engagement. 1 The feeling itself varies from joy
or horror to a mild recognition that the search is
over.

But the process of association may lead not only to a
recognition that an imagined solution of the situation
will result in successful action, but also to a preceding
series of recognitions that other imagined solutions will
not succeed. Varendonck, therefore, speaks of the ‘dia¬
logue form’ of sections of his day-dreams, in which
successive proposed solutions presented themselves,
and were met by successive objections, until some solu¬
tion appeared against which no valid objection sug¬
gested itself. 2 ‘A foreconscious chain of thought,’ he

1 It would be interesting if some student of comparative psychology
could discover whether the process of cerebral association is ever suffi¬
ciently advanced in an intelligent dog, to produce any indication of the
‘click’ phenomenon. Does the dog’s whole organism ever recognize
that his mind has discovered the need of immediate action? Do, for
instance, the dog’s endocrine glands ever discharge their hormones into
the blood-streams as the result of a train of association, starting, as
human ‘day-dreams’ may start, in the mind, or only when the train of
association is started by a sensation - the sight of a rat, or the smell or
step of his master - as Lord Shaftesbury’s train of association was
started by the sight of a book? (above, p. 42).

2 At the threshold between dreaming and foreconscious thinking the
critical faculty may have a strong negative power over the train of
association with no positive power of directing the train. I, as a child,
used often to continue my dreams into a foreconscious state which pre¬
ceded full awakening. I used then to notice that if I was vaguely aware
that a lion was about to appear round the corner of the street in which
I was walking, I could prevent the appearance of the lion, but could
not cause anything else chosen by me to appear.

Ch. 3 THOUGHT BEFORE ART 69

says (his argument shows that he means a foreconscious
chain of thought comparatively near full consciousness),
‘is a succession of hypotheses and rejoinders, of ques¬
tions and answers, occasionally interrupted by memory
hallucinations’ (p. 179).

He gives a long and amusing analysis of a day-dream
in which his foreconscious mind attempted to deal with
the situation created by the fact that he desired to get
an impertinent orderly punished. The orderly was
attached to a Belgian Field Hospital, of which a certain
formidable Lady V. was matron, and where ‘the chief
medical officer was practically at her mercy’ (pp. 64—
76). Varendonck had already reported the orderly to
his own superior officer, Major H. But the orderly had
threatened him with Lady V.’s vengeance. Varendonck
imagines in succession such expedients as writing to
Lady V. before she can hear the orderly’s story, lending
weight to his letter (which he begins to compose) by
accompanying it with his visiting card (with his civilian
professional status indicated on it), or getting a friendly
Belgian captain to send the letter to Lady V. by his cor¬
poral. Some of these expedients were mentally accepted,
and some rejected; until Varendonck remembered, in
consequence of a detailed visual picture of the comfort¬
able room where Lady V. used to sit, that she had a
telephone, and finally decided to call upon Major H.
himself, before Lady V. telephoned her version of the
story to him.

Throughout his book, Varendonck indicates certain
correlations between the rising and falling of conscious-

70

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. 3

ness and the rising and falling of other elements in the
association-process. One such correlation will remind
English readers of the description of falling from day
dreaming into sleep-dreaming at the beginning of Lewis
Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. As the level of conscious¬
ness sank, he found that the critical power which the
civilized human being acquires from education and ex¬
perience sank with it; the steps from one link to another
in association often became such as in his fully waking
state he would have at once recognized as absurd, and
his objections to them might be equally absurd. He
describes, for instance, a ‘bombardment’ phantasy, in
which his mind assumed that after losing both legs he
would be compelled to continue his military service (p.
114), and a ‘flea phantasy,’ in which he hit upon the ex¬
pedient of using a garden roller for killing a flea in the
cracks of his bedroom floor. Freud, also, has shown,
though with a serious amount of exaggeration, that as
consciousness sinks towards sleep the links in the train
of association may become more instinctive and animal;
and the vague and generalized tendencies which the
writers of his school call ‘sex’ or ‘libido’ may appear
in symbolic forms. A similar correlation, therefore,
takes place, according to Varendonck, between increas¬
ing consciousness and increasing rationality: ‘The
upward movements have for consequence the introduc¬
tion into the concatenations of elements proper to con¬
scious thought, namely elements of critical thought-
activity’ (p. 176).

Varendonck is, I think, less successful in indicating

THOUGHT BEFORE ART

7i

Ch. 3

some further correlations between sinking and rising
consciousness and the other elements of the associa¬
tion process. He argues, for instance, that decreasing
and increasing consciousness is accompanied by a de¬
crease or increase in the use of words, and by a corres¬
ponding increase or decrease in the use of visual images.
‘At one end of the series my foreconciousness thinks
in words with a few [visual] illustrations distributed at
random; at the other end this ideation seems to proceed
by means of pictorial images with occasional verbal ex¬
pressions’ (p. 61). In a passage in which he speaks of
his mind in its less-conscious state as his ‘second self,’
he says that this ‘second self’ ‘operates distinctly by
means of optical images, and I have reason to think that
most persons share this peculiarity with me’ (p. 57).
The facts, however, as to the interrelation of verbal and
visual imagery with rising and falling consciousness
seem to me, even on Varendonck’s own evidence, much
more complicated. In actual sleep-dreams, and in the
deeper forms of foreconsciousness, we often use words
which, if we happen afterwards to remember them, are
found to belong to the type which psychologists call
‘glossolaly,’ and which may be less rational than the
most absurd dream-images. 1 At a stage of conscious¬
ness well below rationality, a coherent but almost mean¬
ingless jingle of words may form itself in our minds,
and appear to be perfectly satisfactory. Mr. Robert
Graves, for instance, describes his delight with a dream-
poem consisting of the words:

1 See Varendonck (Day Dreams ), p. 331.

72 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. 3

‘It’s Henry VIII, it’s Henry VIII,

He is leading his armies over to France.’ 1

And a relative of mine woke one morning with the con¬
viction that she had achieved immortality by the lines:

‘Leave there thy steed,

And let it feed

On more than meets the eye.’

And, though it may be true that the use of visual and
other ‘images’ plays on the average a larger part (when
compared with the use of words) in less conscious than
in more conscious thought, some of the most com¬
pletely conscious and most rational thought may be
carried on entirely by the use of wordless images. A
very able and rapid financial thinker, who was trained
as a mathematician, told me that even when his thought
is most conscious and rational he thinks, like a chess¬
player, in terms of seen or felt wordless ‘ situations.’
The wordless images of such a ‘situation’ may be purely
‘kinetic,’ with little or no visual element. The chess
correspondent of the Observer (Feb. 8, 1925) writes
that the great chess-player Alekhin said that ‘he does
not see the pieces in his mind, as pictures, but as force-
symbols; that is as near as one can put it in words.’

Again, when reading Varendonck, one has always to
remember that almost the whole of his first-hand evi¬
dence is derived from introspection during the process
of sinking towards, or rising away from sleep, and that
1 On English Poetry (1922), d. 16.

THOUGHT BEFORE ART

Ch. 3

73

that fact limits the validity of his conclusions about
thought carried on under other conditions. He says,
for instance, that ‘the chains of thought which occupy
our minds during our distractions in waking life are
wholly similar to the phantasies that arise in the somno¬
lent state’ (p. 34). He illustrates this by a description of
the process in which thoughts and counter-thoughts
arise in our mind and are accepted and rejected when we
are in a state of ‘full awareness.’ If, for instance, one
has to compose and send a painful letter: ‘One thinks
about the letter; and in one’s mind it has already been
composed over and over again before one writes it
down; every argument that one can think of has been
put forward and criticized, dropped or retained, until in
the end the letter is present in the mind before it is
confided to paper’ (p. 139). In a later book, Varen-
donck points out that ‘the orator prepares his speech in
the same way, while his mind is absent during a purely
physical occupation; the business-man unintentionally
ponders over his affairs in the train, or as he walks to
the office; the journalist has his article in his mind be¬
fore reaching his office.’ 1 I myself, however, believe
that though less-conscious thought during our hours of
full wakefulness has many analogies with the less-con¬
scious thought which occurs while the main nervous
system is sinking into natural sleep or the hypnotic
trance, there is a difference between the two pro¬
cesses, which is of great importance in the higher and
more difficult forms of intellectual creation (see below,
1 Varendonck, Evolution of the Conscious Faculties (1923), p. 108,

74

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. 3

chapter IX). And the process of ‘distraction’ in waking
life, when a fully-conscious train of association is broken
in upon by a call for our attention to another subject,
is different from the process in which Alice in Won¬
derland ceased to think about cats and bats, and sank
into a region where it seemed quite natural that a
white rabbit should carry a watch in his waistcoat
pocket.

Finally, the student who desires to use Varendonck’s
evidence as a working description of ‘natural’ thought,
must remember that Varendonck was originally
attracted to the whole question by reading Freud’s In¬
terpretation of Dreams ; and that although he is obviously
a man of high intellectual integrity, and much less
liable to the involuntary distortion of his introspective
observations by loyalty to his master than are most of
the followers of Freud, yet even he seems to feel bound
to ascribe every train of association to the driving force
of some ‘wish’ or ‘instinct’ or ‘affect.’ He uses, indeed,
the term ‘affective thinking’ as synonymous with ‘fore¬
conscious thinking’ (e.g. p. 19). He can do so with less
violence to the facts, because the ‘day-dreams’ which he
describes are almost all the result of intense anxiety
either as to his position in the army, or his professional
future, or his intended re-marriage. But nevertheless
in conscientiously analysing his thought-trains he has
to use the word ‘affect’ in many different senses, and
sometimes, apparently, in hardly any sense at all. He
says, indeed, frankly, that ‘I am quite aware that this
same word affect has been used in my various arguments

Ch. 3 THOUGHT BEFORE ART 75

to denote very different notions, such as wishes,
emotions, etc.’ (p. 245). 1

One has to be similarly on one’s guard in using the
description of his thought-processes given by H. Poin -
carej n the celebrated chapter on ‘Mathematical Inven¬
tion’ in his Science and Method, (translated 1914). Poin¬
care is also dealing with the complicated and still
insufficiently analysed problem of ‘emotion’ as a fre¬
quent directing force in the association process, and as
a still more frequent accompaniment of that process.
And he, too, under the influence of the general ten¬
dency in psychological theory which I have called the
‘mechanist’ view, simplifies that relation by ascribing
the direction of all association trains to the drive of some
instinctive emotion. He asks what is the selective force ,
t he ‘sieve.’ which chooses t h e appare ntly_right solution
of a mathematical problem and brings it into full con-
s ciousness, while refecting the apparently wrong solu¬
tion. He answers tha t the c ause is ‘sensibilite’ — an ex-
tremely ambiguous French term which may either be
translated ‘feeling’ or merely anglicized as ‘sensibility.’
‘More commonly,’ he says, ‘the privileged unconscious
phenomena, those that are capable of becoming con¬
scious, are those which, directly or indirectly, most
deeply affect our sensibility’ (p. 58). He adds that, in

1 Varendonck’s later book, The Evolution of the Conscious Faculties
(1923), is much less valuable than his Day Dreams (1921), because it
contains fewer of those introspective records in which he excels, and
more of the psychological generalisations in which he seems to me to be
weak.

76 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. 3

the case of his own mathematical discoveries, the sensi¬
bility concerned is that which arises from the aesthetic
instinct. ‘It may appear surprising that sensibility
should be introduced in connection with mathematical
demonstrations, which, it would seem, can only interest
the intellect. But not if we bear in mind the feeling of
mathematical beauty, of the harmony of numbers an d

forms, and of geometric elegance. It is a real aesthetic

feeling, that all true mathematicians recognize. . . .
The useful combinations are precisely the most beauti-
ful’ (p. 58).

Poincare’s authority is sufficient to assure us that in
his case the instinctive appreciation of elegance did play
a real part in stimulating and guiding many of his sub¬
conscious trains of thought, and in deciding which of
many subconsciously imagined solutions should pro¬
duce t he ‘click’ of cons cious succes s. He may even be
right in saying that without a rather high degree of this
testhetic instinct no man will ever be a great mathe¬
matical discoverer (p. 60). But it is extremely unlikely
that the aesthetic instinct alone was the ‘power’ driving
the ‘machine’ of his thought. He must have possessed
some of that ‘public spirit’ which is an almost indispen-
able condition of a lifetime spent in intellectual toil.
He must have had many ambitions and loyalties and
habits of thinking and feeling. Above all he had a
brain which without scope for its self-activity would
have been as restless as a wild hawk in a cage. And each
of these factors must have played its part in the thought-
processes that went on in the varying levels of his con-

Ch. 3 THOUGHT BEFORE ART 77

sciousness. One almost fears that if Poincare had been
a friend of Freud, instead of being a friend of Boutroux
who was a friend of William James, he might have be¬
come certain that libido was the sole and sufficient
‘sieve’ of his thoughts.

But, while the introspective evidence both of Varen-
donck and of Poincare is, I believe, presented in a set¬
ting of over-simplified theory, it is nevertheless possible
for the student after reading their books to form, with
the help of his own introspection, a fair working con¬
ception of t hose ‘natural’ th ought-processes, which,
however much influenced by experience and habit, arc

not, at the time of thinking, voluntarily controlled by

any rules of the thinking a rt. He will observe in his
own mind automatic trains of associated ideas, some
ending with a remembered positive or negative decision,
some broken and at once forgotten. Some of these
trains may belong to that primitive type which has given
rise to the ‘mechanist’ conception of the relation be¬
tween ‘instinct’ and ‘reason.’ That is to say, behind the
train may be the urge of a strong and simple instinct,
love, or hatred, or fear, driving the train onward, judg¬
ing its results, and bringing it back again and again to
the same starting-point. Or the connecting cause may
be some habit of thought; or, again, the upper brain
may be actirg on its own initiative, or in obedience to a
‘curiosity’ which may only be another name for more or
less independent brain-activity. And, at any moment,
a passionless association may lead him to a conclusion
that wakens a vehement passion, or a train of thought

7$ THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. 3

driven by passion may fade into a passionless reverie.
Flickering over all these processes, as the searchlights
flicker along a line of cliffs, there may be a hundred
different conscious or less-conscious ‘feelings,’ alterna-*
ting with, and fading into each other. He may be
dimly aware of some brooding ‘sentiment.’ The hor¬
mones discharged by the obscure processes of the endo¬
crine glands may pervade him with v ague ‘euphoria’ or
‘dysphoria’ — e lation or discomfor t, energy or inertia.
Actual sensations, and the more or less vivid memories
of sensations, may play their part. Or, he may be able
afterwards to remember sudden flashes of emotional
experience almost too momentary for description, feel¬
ings of queerness, or surprise, or recognition, or amuse¬
ment, or the craftsman’s delight in his own skill and
success.

IV

STAGES OF CONTROL

So far, in this book. I have discussed two pr oblems
which are preliminary to any formulation of an art of

t houg ht: first, wh at conception of the human or ganism
and human consciousness best indicates the general
facts with which such an art must deal; and,, secondly,
what is the ‘natural’ thought-proccssjwhich such an art
must attempt to modify. In this chapter, I shall ask
at what stages in that thought-process the thinker >
should bring the conscious and voluntary effort of his
art_to_h,ear. Here we at once meet the difficulty that
unless we can recognize a psychological event, and dis¬
tinguish it from other events, we cannot bring con¬
scious effort to bear directly upon it; and that our
mental life is a stream of intermingled psychological
events, all of which affect each other, any of which, at
any given moment, may be beginning or continuing
or ending, and which, therefore, are extremely hard to
distinguish from each other.

We can, to some degree, avoid this difficulty if we
t ake a sing l e achievement o f thought — the making of
a new generalization or inven tion, or the poetical ex¬
pression of a new idea — a nd ask how it was brou g ht
about . We can then rou ghly d issect out a continu ous J
process, with a beginning and a middle and an en d of!
its own. Helmholtz, for insta nce, the great German'
physicist, speaking in 1891 at a banquet on his

79

8o

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. 4

-fjCoA .

seventieth birthday, described the way in which his
most important new thoughts had come to him. He
said that after previous investigation of the problem
‘in all directions . . . happy ideas come unexpectedly
without effort, like an inspiration. So far as I am con¬
cerned, they have never come to me when my m ind was
fatigued, or when I was at my working table. . . .
They came particularly readily during the slow ascent
of wooded hills on a sunny day.’ 1 Helmholtz here gives
us three stages in the formation of a new thought. The
first in time I shall call Preparation, the stage du rmg
which the problem was ‘investigated ... in all direcr
t ions’ ; the second is the stage during which he was not
consciously thfnkTng about the problem, which I shall
call Incubation^ the third, consi sting of th e appear an ce
of the ‘happy idea’ together with the psychological
events which immediately preceded and accompanied
that appearance, I shall call Illuminatio n.

A nd I shall add a fourth sta ge, of Verification ? which
Helmholtz does not here mention. Henri Poincare, for
instance, in the book Science and Method , which I have
already quoted (p. 75), describes in vivid detail the
successive stages of two of his great mathematical dis-

1 See Rignano, Psychology of Reasoning (1923), pp. 267-8. See also
Plato, Symposium (210): ‘He who has been instructed thus far in the
things of love, and has learned to see beautiful things in due order and
succession, when he comes to the end, will suddenly perceive a beauty
wonderful in its nature’; and Remy de Goncourt: ‘My conceptions rise
into the field of consciousness like a flash of lightning or the flight of a
bird’ (quoted by H. A. Bruce, Psychology and Parenthood, 1919, p. 89).

8 r

Ch. 4 STAGES OF CONTROL

coveries. Both of them came to him after a period of
Incubation (due in one case to his military service as a
reservist, and in the other case to a journey), during
which no conscious mathematical thinking was done,
but, as Poincare believed, much unconscious mental
exploration took place. In both case s Incu bation was
preceded by a Preparation stage of hard, conscious. P
systematic, and fruitless analysis of the prob lem. In
both cases the final idea came to him ‘with the same

characteristics of conciseness, suddenness, and im¬

mediate certainty* (p. 54). Each was followed by a
period of Verification, in which both the validity of the
idea was tested, and the idea itself was reduced to exact
form. ‘I t never happens,’ says Poincare, in his descrip¬
tion of the Verification stage, ‘that unconscious work.
supplies ready-made^ the res ult of a lengthy calculation
in which we have only to apply fixed rules. . . . AE
that we can hope from these inspirations, which arc the.
fruit of unconscious work, is to obtain poin ts of depar¬
ture for such calculations . As for the calculations them¬
selves, they must be made in the second period of con¬
scious work which follows the inspiration, and in which
the results of the inspiration are verified and the conse¬
quences deduced. The rules of these calculations are
strict and complicated; they demand discipline, atten¬
tion, will, and consequently, consciousness’ (pp. 62,
63). In the dai ly stream of thought thpsp fopr Hiffpr-
ent stages constantly overlap each other as we explore
differen t problems. An economist reading a Blue Book,
a physiologist watching an experiment, or a business

82

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. 4

man going through his morning’s letters, may at the
same time be ‘incubating’ on a problem which he pro¬
posed to himself a few days ago, be accumulating know¬
ledge in ‘preparation’ for a second problem, and be
‘verifying’ his conclusions on a third problem. Even in
exploring the same problem, the mind may be uncon¬
sciously incubating on one aspect of it, while it is con¬
sciously employed in preparing for or verifying another
aspect. And it must always be remembered that much
v ery im portant thinking, done for instance by a poet.
exploring his own memories*, or by a man trying to see
clearly his emotional relation to his country or his party,
resembles musical co mposition in that the stages lead-

ing to success are not very easily fitted into a ‘probl em
and solution’ scheme. Yet, even when success in
thought means the creation of something felt to be
beautiful and true rather than the solution of a pre¬
scribed problem, the four stages of Preparation, Incu¬
bation, Illumination, and the Verification of the final
result can generally be distinguished from each other.

If we accept this analysis, we are in a position to ask
t o what de gree, an d b y what m eans, we can bring con¬
scious effort, and the habits w'hich arise from conscious
effort, to bear upon each of the f our stages. I shall not*
in this chapter, deal at any length w r ith the stage of Pre¬
paration. It includes the whole process of intellectual
educatio n. Men have known for thousands of years
that conscious effort and its resulting habits can be used
to improve the thought-processes of young persons,
and have formulated for that purpose an elaborate art of

STAGES OF CONTROL

Ch. 4

83

education. The ‘educated’ man can, in consequence,
‘ put his mind on’ to a chosen subject, and ‘turn his

mind off’ 1 in a wav which i s impossible to an unedu¬
cated man.. The educated man has also acquired, by
the effort of observation and memorizing, a body of
remembered facts and words which gives him a wider
range in the final moment of association, as well as a
number of those habitual tracks of association which
constitute ‘thought-systems’ like ‘French policy’ or
‘scholastic philosophy’ or ‘biological evolution,’ and
which present themselves as units in the process of
thought.

The educated man has, again, learnt, and can, in the
Preparation stage, voluntarily or habitually follow ou t.
rules as to the order in which he shall direct his atten -

tion to the successive elements in a problem. Hobbes

referred to this fact when in the Leviathan he described
‘regulated thought,’ and contrasted it with that ‘wild
ranging of the mind’ which occurs when the thought
process is undirected. Regulated thought is, he says, a
‘seeking.’ ‘Sometimes,’ for instance, ‘a man seeks what
he has lost. . . . Sometimes a man knows a place deter¬
minate, within the compass whereof he is to seek; and
then his thoughts run over all the parts thereof, in the
same manner as one would sweep a room to find a jewel;
or as a spaniel ranges the field, till he find a scent; or as
a man should run over the alphabet, to start a rhyme.’
A spaniel with the brain of an educated human being
could not, by a direct effort of will, scent a partridge in a
1 See Sir H. Taylor in my Our Social Heritage, Chap. II.

84 TH E ART OF THOUGHT Ch.4

distant part of the field. But he could so ‘quarter’ the
field by a preliminary voluntary arrangement that the
less-voluntary process of smelling would be given every
chance of successfully taking place.

I ncluded in these rules for th e pr eliminary ‘regula ¬

tion’ of our thought are the whole traditional art of
logic, the mathematical forms which are the logic of the
modern experimental sciences, and the methods of
systematic and continuous examination of present or
recorded phenomena which are the basis of astronomy,
sociology and the other ‘observational’ sciences. Closely
connected with this voluntary use of logical methods
is the voluntary choice of a ‘problem-attitude’ (Auf-
gabe). Our mind is not likely to give us a clear answer
to any particular problem unless we set it a clear ques^.
tion, and we are more likely to notice the significance
of any new piece of evidence, or new association of
ideas, if we have formed a definite conception of a case
to be proved or disproved. A very successful thinker
' in natural science told me that he owed much of his
success to his practice of following up, when he felt his
mind confused, the implications of two propositions,
both of which he had hitherto accepted as true, until
he had discovered that one of them must be untrue.
Huxley o n that point once quoted B acon, ‘ Tru th comes
out of error much more rapidly than it co mes__out of
c onfusion? and went on, ‘If you go buzzing about
between right and wrong, vibrating and fluctuating,
you come out nowhere; but if you are absolutely and
thoroughly and persistently wrong you must some_of

STAGES OF CONTROL

Ch. 4

85

these days have the extreme good fortune of knocking,
your head against a fact, and that sets you all right
again.’ 1 This is, of course, a production, by conscious
effort, of that ‘dialogue form’ of alternate suggestion
and criticism which Varendonck describes as occurring
in the process of uncontrolled thought. 2 It is, indeed,
sometimes possible to observe such an automatic ‘dia¬
logue’ at a point where a single effort of will would turn
it into a process of preparatory logical statement. On
July 18, 1917, I passed on an omnibus the fashionable
church of St. Margaret’s, Westminster. Miss Ashley,
the richest heiress of the season, was being gorgeously
married, and the omnibus conductor said to a friend,
‘Shocking waste of money! But, there, it does create a
lot of labour, I admit that.’ Perhaps I neglected my
duty as a citizen in that I did not say to him, ‘Now make
one effort to realize that inconsistency, and you will
have prepared yourself to become an economist.’

And though I have assumed, for the sake of clear¬
ness, that the thinker is preparing himself for the solu¬
tion of a single problem, he will often (particularly if he
is working on the very complex material of the social
sciences) have several kindred problems in his mind, on
all of which the voluntary work of preparation has
been, or is being done, and for any of which, at the
Illumination stage, a solution may present itself.

The fourth stage, of Verification, closely resembles

1 ‘Science and Art and Education,’ Huxley, Collected Essays, Vol,
III, p. 174.

2 See above, p. 68,

86

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. 4

o

t he first stage, of Preparatio n. It is normally, as Poin¬
care points out, fully conscious, and men have worked
out much the same series of mathematical and logical
rules for controlling Verification by conscious .effort as
those which are used in the control of Preparation.

There remain the second and third stages, Incuba¬
tion and Illumination. The Incubation stage covers
two different things, of which the first is the negative
fact that during Incubation we do not voluntarily_pr
consciously think on a particular problem, and the
second.is the positive fact that a series of unconscious
and involuntary (or foreconscious and forevoluntary)
mental events may take place during that period. It js
the first fact about Incubation which I shall now dis¬
cuss, leaving the second fact — of subconscious thought
during Incubation, and the relation of such thought to
Illumination - to be more fully discussed in connection
with the Illumination stage. Voluntary abstention from
conscious thought on any particular problem may, itself,
take two forms: the period of abstention may be spent
either in conscious m ental work on other problems, or
in a relaxation from all conscious mental work. The
first kind of Incubation economizes time, and is there¬
fore often the better. We can often get more result in
the same time by beginning several problems in suc¬
cession, and voluntarily leaving them unfinished while
we turn to others, than by finishing our work on
each problem at one sitting. A well-known academic
p sychologist, for instance, who was also a preacher, t old
me that he found by experience that his Sunday sermon

Ch. 4 STAGES OF CONTROL 87

was much better if he posed the problem on Monday
than if he did so later in the week, although he might
give the same number of hours of conscious work to it
in each case. It seems to be a tradition among practis¬
ing barristers to put off any consideration of each brief
to the latest possible moment before they have to deal
with it, and to forget the whole matter as rapidly as
possible after dealing with it. This fact may help to
explain a certain want of depth which has often been
noticed in the typical lawyer-statesman, and which may
be due to his conscious thought not being sufficiently
extended and enriched by subconscious thought.

But, in the case of the more_.difficult forms of crea- Go ■
five thought, the making, for instance, of a scientific
discovery, or the writing of a poem or play or the
formulation of an important political decision, it is
desirable not only that there should be an interval free
from conscious thought on the particular problem con¬
cerned, but also that that interval should be so spent
that nothing should interfere with the free working of
the unconscious or partially conscious processes of the
mind.^ In those cases, th e stage of Incubation sh ould-
i n elude a large amount of actual mental relaxa tion. It
would, indeed, be interesting to examine, from that
point of view, the biographies of a couple of hundred
original thinkers and writers. A. R. Wallace, for in¬
stance, hit upon the theory of evolution by natural
selection in his berth during an attack of malarial fever
at sea; and Darwin was comp elled by ill-health to spend
the greater part of his waking hours in physical and

88 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch.4

mental relaxation. S ometimes a thinker has been able
to get a sufficiency of relaxation owing to a disposition
to idleness* against which he has vainly struggled.
More often, perhaps, what he has thought to be idle¬
ness, is really that urgent craving for intense and
uninterrupted day-dreaming which Anthony Trollope
describes in his account of his boyhood.

One effect of such a comparative biographical study
might be the formulat ion nf .a__frw f 0 thr

relation between original intellectua l work a nd the
virtue of indu stry. There ar e thousands of idle
‘ geniuses ’ who require to learn that, without a degre e
of industry in Preparation and Verification, of which
many of them have nox onceptian. no great inte llectual
work can be done, and that the h abit of procrastination
may be even more disastrous to a pr ofessiona l thinker
than it is to a man of business . And yet a thinker of
good health and naturally fertile mind may have to be
told that mere industry is for him, as it was for Trollope
in his later years, the worst temptation of the devil.
Cardinal Manning was a man of furious industry, and
the suspension of his industry as an Anglican arch¬
deacon during his illness in 1847 was, for good or evil,
an important event in the history of English religion.
Some of those who, like myself, live in the diocese of
London, believe that we have reason to regret an in¬
sufficiency of intellectual leadership from our present
bishop. The bishop himself indicated one of the
causes of our discontent in a letter addressed, in
September, 1922, to his clergy. ‘I come back to an

Ch. 4 STAGES OF CONTROL 89

autumn of what, from a human point of view, is un¬
relieved toil. October 1st to Christmas Day is filled
every day, except for the one day off every week, from
10 a.m. to 6 p.m.’ Then comes a long list of adminis¬
trative and pastoral engagements, including ‘three days
interviewing no Harrow boys to be confirmed,’ ‘a
critical Bill to see through the House of Lords,’ and
‘some sixty sermons and addresses already arranged in
the diocese, besides the daily letters and interviews.’
‘All this,’ he says, ‘might justify the comment of a
kindly man of the world, “Why, Bishop, you live the
life of a dog! But this is precisely, though on a larger
scale, the life of every one of you.’ ’ ’ x It is clear that the
bishop considers that he and his clergy ought to be
admired for so spending their time; and that he con¬
ceives the life of a turnspit dog to be the most likely
to enable them to be successful in the exercise of
their office. One sometimes, however, wonders what
would be the result if our bishop were kept for ten
weeks in bed and in silence, by an illness neither
painful nor dangerous, nor inconsistent with full mental
efficiency.

Mental relaxation during the Incubation stage may.
of course include, and sometimes requires, a certain
amount of p hysical exercise. I have already quoted
Helmholtz’s reference to ‘ the ascent of wooded hills
on a sunny day.’ A. Carrel, the great New York
physiologist, is said to receive all his really important
thoughts while quietly walking during the summer
1 Qhurch Times, Sept. 22, 1922,

90 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch.4

vacation in his native Brittany. Jastrow s ays that
‘t hinkers have at all times resorted to the restful in ¬
s piration of a walk in the woods or a stroll over hill
;::id dale.’ 1 When I once discussed this fact with an
athletic Cambridge friend, he expressed his gratitude
for any evidence which v/ould prove that it was the
duty of all intellectual workers to spend their vacations
in Alpine climbing. Alpine climbing has undoubtedly
much to give both to health and to imagination, but
it would be an interesting quantitative problem whether
Goethe, while riding a mule over the Gemmi Pass, and
Wordsworth, while walking over the Simplon, were in
a more or in a less fruitful condition of Incubation
than are a modern Alpine Club party ascending, with
hands and feet and rope and ice-axe, the Finster-
Aarhorn. In this, however, as in many other respects,
it may be that the human organism gains more from
the alternation of various forms of activity than from a
consistent devotion to one form. In England, the ad¬
ministrative methods of the older universities during
term-time may, I sometimes fear, by destroying the
possibility of Incubation, go far to balance any intel¬
lectual advantages over the newer universities which
they may derive from their much longer vacations. At
Oxford and Cambridge, men on whose powers of in¬
vention and stimulus the intellectual future of the
country may largely depend, are made personally re¬
sponsible for innumerable worrying details of filling up
forms and sending in applications. Their subconscious
1 J* Jastrow, The Subconscious (1906), p. 94.

Ch. 4 STAGES OF CONTROL 91

minds are set on the duty of striking like a clock at the
instant when Mr. Jones’s fee must be paid to the
Registrar. In the newer English universities, the same
duties are rapidly and efficiently performed by a corps
of young ladies, with card-catalogues, typewriters, and
diaries.

But perhaps the most dangerous subs_titUte_for bodily
a nd mental relaxation during the stag e of Incubation is ^
neither violent exercise nor r outine administration , but
the habit of industrious passive reading. Schopenhauer
wrote that ‘to put away one ’s own original thoughts m )
order to take up a book is the sin against the Holy
Ghost ,’ 1 During the century from 1760 to x 860, many/
of the best brains in England were prevented from
acting with full efficiency by the way in which the
Greek and Latin classics were then read. It is true
that Shelley’s imagination was stung into activity by
Plato and iEschylus, and that Keats won a new vision
of life from Chapman’s translation of Homer; but even
the ablest of those who then accepted the educational
ideals of Harrow and Eton and Oxford and Cambridge
did not approach the classical writers with Shelley’s
or Keats’s hunger in their souls. They plodded through
Horace and Sophocles and Virgil and Demosthenes
with a mild conscious aesthetic feeling, and with a
stronger and less conscious feeling of social, intellectual
and moral superiority; a nyone who was in the habit of
r eading the classi cs with his feet on the fender must

1 Schopenhauer, ‘Selbstdenkcn,’ § 260, Parerga und Paralipometia
(1851), Vol. II, p. 412.

92 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch.4

certainly, they felt, be not only a gentleman and a
scholar but also a good man.

Carlyle once told Anthony Trollope that a man, when
travelling, ‘should not read, but sit still and label his
thoughts/ 1 On the other hand, Macaulay, before he
went out to India in 1834 to be Legislative Member of
the Supreme Council, wrote to his sister: ‘The provision
which I design for the voyage is Richardson, Voltaire’s
works, Gibbon, Sismondi’s History of the French , Davila,
Orlando in Italian, Don Quixote in Spanish, Homer in
Greek, Horace in Latin. I must also have some books
of jurisprudence, and some to initiate me in Persian
and Hindustanee’; and, at the end of the four months’
voyage, he wrote: ‘Except at meals, I hardly exchanged
a word with any human being. . . . During the whole
voyage I read with keen and increasing enjoyment. I
devoured Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, French, and
English; folios, quartos, octavos, and duodecimos.’ 2 If
he had followed Carlyle’s advice, he would have had a
better chance of thinking out a juristic and educational
policy for India which would not have been a mere
copy of an English model. One understands why
Gladstone’s magnificent enthusiasm and driving force
was never guided by sufficient elasticity or originality
of mind, when one reads, in Mrs. Gladstone’s Life , how
she and her sister married the two most splendid
Etonians of their time - Gladstone and his friend Lord

1 Trollope’s Autobiography (edition of 1921), p. 94.

2 G. O. Trevelyan, Life of Macaulay (edition of 1881), pp. 256 and
262,

Ch. 4 STAGES OF CONTROL 93

Lyttelton - and spent a honeymoon of four in Scotland.
‘Any little waiting time as at the railway station,’ says
her daughter, Mrs. Drew, ‘was now spent in reading —
both husbands carrying the inevitable little classics in
their pockets.’ During the days when new knowledge,
new forms of thought, new methods in industry and
war and politics, and the rise of new nations were trans¬
forming Western civilization, ‘Lord Lyttelton was to
be seen at cricket-matches in the playing field at Eton,
lying on his front, reading between the overs, but never
missing a ball.’ 1

So far in this chapter I have inquired how far we can
voluntarily improve our methods of thought at those
stages — Preparation, Incubation (in its negative sense
of abstention from voluntary thought on a particular
problem), and Verification - over which our conscious
will has comparatively full control. I sh all no w.discuss,
the much more difficult question of the degree to which,
our will can influence the less controllable stage which.
I have called Illumination . Helmholtz and Poincare,
in the passages which I quoted above, both speak of
the appearance of a new idea as instantaneous and un¬
expected. If we so define the Illumination stage as to
re strict it to this instantaneous ‘flash ,’ it is obviou s that
we cannot influence it by a direct effort of will; because
we can only bring our will to bear upon psychological
events which last for an appreciable time. On the other
hand, the final ‘flash,’ or ‘click’, as I pointed out in
Chapter III, is the culmination of a successful train of
1 Catherine Gladstone , by Mary Drew, p. 32.

94 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. 4

association, which may have lasted for an appreciable
t ime, and which has p robably been preceded by a
series of tentative and unsuccessful trains. The series
of unsuccessful trains of association may last for
periods varying from a few seconds to several hours.
H. Poincare, who describes the tentative and unsuc¬
cessful trains as being, in his case, almost entirely
unconscious, believed that they occupied a considerable
proportion of the Incubation stage. ‘We might,' he
wrote, ‘say that the conscious work, [i.e., what I have
called the Preparation stage], proved more fruitful
because it was interrupted [by the Incubation stage],
and that the rest restored freshness to the mind. But
it is more probable that the rest was occupied with
unconscious work, and that the result of this work was
afterwards revealed.' 1

Different thinkers, and the same thinkers at different
t imes, must, of course, v ary greatly as to the time occu¬
pied by their unsuccessful trains of associatipn; and the
same variation must exist in the duration of the final
and successful train of association. Sometimes the suc¬
cessful train seems to consist of a single leap of associa¬
tion, or of successive leaps which are so rapid as to be

1 H. Poincare, Science a?id Method (trans., pp. 54 and 55). On the
other hand, one of the ablest of modern mathematical thinkers told me
that he believed that his Incubation period was, as a rule, spent in a
state ofactuaLmcntalxQpQ.se for a lLorpartof his bra in, which made the
l ater explosi on of intense a nd successful thought possi ble. His belief
may have been partly due to the fact that his brain started fewer unsuc¬
cessful and more successful association-trains than the brains of other
men.

STAGES OF CONTROL

Ch. 4

95

almost instantaneous. Hobbes’s ‘Roman penny’ train
of association occurred between two remarks in an
ordinary conversation, and Hobbes, as I have said, ends
his description of it with the words, ‘and all this in a
moment of time, for thought is quick’ ( Leviathan ,
Chap. III). Hobbes himself was probably an excep¬
tionally rapid thinker, and Aubrey may have been quot¬
ing Hobbes’s own phrase when he says that Hobbes
used to take out his no te-book ‘as soon .as a thought
darted,.’ 1

But if our will is to control a psychological process,
it is necessary that that process should not only last for
an appreciable time, but should also be, during that
time, sufficiently conscious for the thinker to be at least
av/are that something is happening to him. On this
point, the evidence seems to show that both the success¬
ful trains of associat ion, which might have led to the
‘flash’ of success, and the final and successful train are
normally either unconscious, or take place (with ‘ris¬
ings’ and ‘fallings’ of consciousness as success seems to
approach or retire), in that periphery or ‘fringelof con-
sciousness_which surrounds our ‘focal’ consciousness as
the sun’s ‘corona’ surrounds the disk of full luminosity. 2

1 See my The Great Society, (1914), p. 201.

2 I take the word ‘fringe’ from William James, who says in his Prin¬
ciples, Vol. I, p. 2 5 8: ‘Let us use the words psychic overtone, suffusion, or
fringe, to designate the influence of a faint brain process upon our
thought, as it makes it aware of relations and objects but dimly per¬
ceived.’ The characteristics of our ‘fringe-consciousness’ may be a
result of that ‘hormic’ character of the human organism which I dis¬
cussed in Chapter I. The ‘over’ and ‘under’ tones of a piano indicate

96 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch.4

This ‘fringe-consciousness’ may last up to the ‘flash’
instant, may accompany it, and in some cases may con¬
tinue beyond it. But, just as it is very difficult to see the
sun’s corona unless the disk is hidden by a total eclipse,
so it is very difficult to observe our ‘fringe-conscious¬
ness’ at the instant of full Illumination, or to remember
the preceding ‘fringe’ after full Illumination has taken
place. As William James says, ‘When the conclusion
is there, we have always forgotten most of the steps pre¬
ceding its attainment’ (.Principles , Volume I, p. 260).

It is obvious that both Helmholtz and Poincare had
either not noticed, or had forgotten any ‘fringe-con¬
scious’ psychological events which may have preceded
and have been connected with the ‘sudden’ and ‘un¬
expected’ appearance of their new ideas. But other
thinkers have observed and afterwards remembered
their ‘fringe-conscious’ experiences both before and
even at the moment of full Illumination. William
James himself, in that beautiful and touching, though
sometimes confused introspective account of his own
thinking which forms Chapter IXof h\sPrinciples, says:
‘Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed
in the free water that flows round it. With it goes the
sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo
of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither

the simultaneous vibration ot other strings under the influence of the
string which was originally struck. The ‘fringe-consciousness’ of a
human being may sometimes indicate that the activity of the main
centre of his consciousness is being accompanied by the imperfectly
co-ordinated activity of other factors in his organism.

Ch. 4 STAGES OF CONTROL 97

it is to lead. The significance, the value, of the image
is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and
escorts it’ ( Principles , Vol. I, p. 255).

I find it convenient to use the te rm ‘ Intimation * for
t hat moment in the Illumination stage when our fringe-
consciousness of an association-train is in the state of
rising consciousness which indicates that the fully con¬
scious flash of success is coming. A high English civil
servant described his experience of Intimation to me by
saying that when he is working at a difficult problem,
‘I often know that the solution is coming, though I
don’t know what the solution will be,’ and a very able
university student gave me a description of the same
fact in his case almost in the same words. Many
thinkers, indeed, would recognize the experience which
Varendonck describes when he says that on one occa¬
sion : ‘When I became aware that my mind was sim¬
mering over something, I had a dim feeling which it is
very difficult to describe; it was like a vague impression
of mental activity. But when the association had risen
to the surface, it expanded into an impression of joy.’ 1
His phrase ‘expanded into an impression of joy/ clearly
describes the rising of consciousness as the flash
approaches.

Most introspective observers speak, as I have done,
of Intimation as a ‘feeling,’ and the ambiguity of that
word creates its usual crop of difficulties. It is often
hard to discover in descriptions of Intimation whether
the observer is describing a bare awareness of mental
1 The Psychology of Day Dreams , p. 282.

G

98 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch.4

activity with no emotional colouring, or an awareness
of mental activity coloured by an emotion which may
either have originally helped to stimulate the train of
thought, or may have been stimulated by the train of
thought during its course. Mr. F. M . McMurry seems
to refer to little more than awareness when he says, in
his useful text-book, How to Study (p. 278), ‘Many of
the best thoughts, probably most of them, do not come,
like a flash, fully into being but find their beginnings in
dim feelings, faint intuitions that need to be encouraged
and coaxed before they can be surely felt and defined.’
Dewey , on the other hand, is obviously describing
awareness coloured by emotion when he says that a
problem may present itself ‘as a more or less vague feel¬
ing of the unexpected, of something queer, strange,
funny, or disconcerting.’ 1 Wundt was more ambiguous
when he said (in perhaps the earliest description of In¬
timation) that feeling is the pioneer of knowledge, and
that a novel thought may come to consciousness first of
all in the form of a feeling. 2 My own students ha ve
desc ribed the Intimation preceding a new thought a s

being sometimes coloured by a slight feeling of discom-

f ort arising from a sense of separation from one’s accus-
tqmed self. A student, for instance, told me that his
first recognition that he was reaching a new political

1 How zve think (1910), p. 74.

2 Wundt (quoted by E. B. Titchener, Experimental Psychology of
the Thought-Processes, p. 103). Wundt’s words are ‘In diesem Sinn ist
das Gefuhl der Pionier der Erkenntniss’ ( Grundzlige der Physio-
logischen Psychologic, Vol. II, 1893, p. 521).

STAGES OF CONTROL

Ch. 4

99

outlook came from a feeling, when, in answer to a ques¬
tion, he was stating his habitual political opinions, that
he ‘was listening to himself.’ I can just remember that
a good many years ago, in a period prece di ng an impor¬

tant change of my own political position, I had a vague.
a lmost physical, recurrent feeling as if my cloth es did
not quite fit me. If this feeling of Intimation lasts for
an appreciable time, and is either sufficiently conscious,
or can by an effort of attention be made sufficiently
conscious, it is obvious that our will can be brought
directly to bear on it. We can at least attempt to in¬
hibit, or prolong, or divert, the brain-activity which
Intimation shows to be going on. And, if Intimation
accompanies a rising train of association which the
brain accepts, so to speak, as plausible, but would not,
without the effort of attention, automatically push to
the flash of conscious success, we can attempt to hold
on to such a train on the chance that it may succeed.

It is a more difficult and more important question
whether such an exercise of will is likely to improve our
thinking. Many people would argue that any attempt
to control the thought-process at this point will always
do more harm than good. A schoolboy sitting down to
do an algebra sum, a civil servant composing a minute,
Shakespeare re-writing a speech in an old play, will,
they would say, gain no more by interfering with the
ideas whose coming is vaguely indicated to them, be¬
fore they come, than would a child by digging up a
sprouting bean, or a hungry man in front of a good
meal, by bringing his will to bear on the intimations of

100 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch.4

activity in his stomach or his salivary glands. A born
runner, they would say, achieves a much more success¬
ful co-ordination of those physiological and psycho¬
logical factors in his organism which are concerned in
running, by concentrating his will on his purpose of
catching the man in front of him, than by troubling
about the factors themselves. And a born orator will
use better gestures if, as he speaks, he is conscious of
his audience than if he is conscious of his hands. This
objection might be fatal to the whole conception of an
art of thought if it did not neglect two fac ts, first tha t
we are not all ‘born’ runners or orators or th inkers, and

that a good deal of the necessary work of the world has

to be done by men who in such respects have to achieve

ski]] instead of receiving it at birth; and, s econdl y, that

t he process of learning an art should, even in the c qpe

of those who have the finest natural endowment for it .
be more conscious than its practic e. Mr. Harry Var-
don, when he is acquiring a new grip, is wise to make
himself more conscious of the relation between his will
and his wrists than when he is addressing himself to his
approach-shot at the decisive hole of a championship.
The violinist with the most magnificent natural tem¬
perament has to think of his fingers when he is acquir¬
ing a new way of bowing; though on the concert-plat-
form that acquirement may sink beneath the level of
full consciousness. And, since the use of our upper
brain for the discovery of new truth depends on more
recent and less perfect evolutionary factors than does
the use of our wrists for hitting small objects with a

Ch. 4 STAGES OF CONTROL ioi

stick, or for causing catgut to vibrate in emotional
patterns, conscious art may prove to be even more im¬
portant, as compared to spontaneous gift, in thought
than in golf or violin-playing. Here, again, individual
thinkers, and the same thinker at different times and
when engaged on different tasks, must differ greatly.
But my general conclusion is that there are few or
none among those whose work in life is thought who
will not g ain hv directing their attention from time
t o time to the feeling of Intimation, and by bring ing
t heir will to bear upon the cerebral processes which _i t
indicates.

On this point the most valuable evidence that 1 know
of is that gi ven by the poe ts. P oets hav e, more con¬
stantly than other intellectual workers, t o ‘make us e’
(as Varendonck says) ‘o f foreconscious processes for
conscious ends.’ 1 The production of a poem is a psy¬
chological experiment, tried and tested under severer
conditions than those of a laboratory, and.the poet is
generally able to describe his ‘fringe-consciousness’
during the experiment with a more accurate and sensi¬
tive use of language than is at the command of most
laboratory psychologists. Sev eral of the younger living
English poets have given admirable descriptions of
I ntimatio n, of ten using metaphors derived from o ur
e xperience in daily life of a feeling t hat there is some¬
t hing which we have mislaid, and which we cannot find
because we have forgotten what it is . Mr. John Drink-

water, for instance, says:

1 The Psychology of Day Dreams , p. 152.

ioz THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch.4

‘Haunting the lucidities of life
That are my daily beauty, moves a theme
Beating along my undiscovered mind.’ 1

And Mr. James Stephens says:

‘I would think until I found
Something I can never find,

Something lying on the ground
In the bottom of my mind.’ 2

Mr. J. Middleton Murry, in his Problem of Style (1922,
P- 93 )> points out the psychological truth of Shake¬
speare’s well-known description of the poet’s work:

... ‘as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothings
A local habitation and a name.’

‘ Forms of things unknown ’ a nd ‘airy nothing s’ are vivi d
descriptions of the first appearance of Intimati on; and
‘ local habitation and a name’ indicates the increasin g

verbal clearness of thought as Intimation approach es

t he final moment of Illuminati on; and may also indicate
that Shakespeare was a much more conscious artist than
many of his admirers believe.

Some E nglish poets and students of p o etry h ave
gi ven descri ptions not only of the feeling of Intimation,
but also of the effort of will by which a poet may at-

1 J. Drinkwater, Loyalties, p. 50 (‘The Wood’).

2 Georgian Poetry (1913-15), ‘The Goat Path,’ p. 189.

Ch. 4

STAGES OF CONTROL

t empt to influence t he me ntal events indicated by Inti¬
mation. and the dangers to the thought itself involved

in such an effort. In these

metaphors drawn from a boy’s a>

hand an elusive fish, or a bird which will da rt off if the
effort is made a fraction of a second too soon or too late.
Mr. Robert Grave s allows me to quote in full a charm¬
ing little poem, called ‘ A Pinch of Salt,’ in which he
expands and plays with this metaphor:

‘When a dream is born in you
With a sudden clamorous pain,

When you know the dream is true
And lovely, with no flaw nor stain,

Oh then, be careful, or with sudden clutch
You’ll hurt the delicate thing you prize so much.

Dreams are like a bird that mocks,

Flirting the feathers of his tail
When you seize at the salt-box

Over the hedge you’ll see him sail.

Old birds are neither caught with salt nor chaff;
They watch you from the apple bough and laugh.

Poet, never chase the dream.

Laugh yourself and turn away.

Mask your hunger, let it seem
Small matter if he come or stay;

But when he nestles in your hand at last,

Close up your fingers tight and hold him fast.’ 1

1 Georgian Poetry (1916-17), p. 107.

i °4 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch.4

In this respect, the m ost obvious d an ger ag ainst
which the thinker has to guard is that the association-

train which the feeling of Intimation shows to be going
on may either drift away of itself , as most of our dreams
and day-dreams do, into mere irrelevance and forget¬
fulness, or may be interrupted by the intrusion of other,
trains of association. All thinkers, know the effect of the
ringing ot the telephone bell, or the entrance of so me
o ne with a practical question which must be answered ,
during a promising Intimation. Aristophanes, when in
the Clouds he makes Socrates complain that his disciple
\b y askin g h i m . a.quest i on had ca usedji v aluable tho u g'n t
jt o ‘mis carry, ’ was probably quoting some saying of
Socrates himself, whose mother was a midwife, and who
was fond of that metaphor. If, therefore, the feeling of
Intimation presents itself while one is reading, it is best
to look up from one’s book and so avoid the danger that
the next printed sentence may ‘start a new hare.’
Varendonck describes how, in one of his day-dreams,
‘The idea that manifested itself ran thus: “ There is
something going on in my foreconsciousness which must be
in direct relation to my subject. I ought to stop reading for
a little while , and let it come to the surface .” And, be¬

sides such negative precautions against the interruption
of an association-train, it is often necessary to make a
conscious positive effort of attention to secure success.
Vincent d’lndy, speaking of musical creation, said that
he ‘often has on waking, a fugitive glimpse of a musical
effect which — like the memory of a dream — needs a
1 Day Dreams, p. 190. (The italics arc Varendonck’s.)

STAGES OF CONTROL

Ch. 4

105

strong immediate concentration of mind to keep it from
vanishing/ 1 But even the effort of attention to a train
of association may have the effect of interrupting or
hindering it. Schiller is reported by Vischer to have
said that when he was fully conscious of creation his
imagination did not function ‘with the same freedom
as it had done when nobody was looking over my
shoulder/ 2

To a modern thinker, however, the main danger of
spoiling a train of association occurs in the process of
attempting — perhaps before the train is complete — to
put its conclusion into the words. Mr. Henr y Hazlitt,
in his T hinking as a Scien ce (1916), p. 82, says,
‘ Thoughts of certain kinds are so elusive that to at¬
tempt to articulate them is to scare them away, as a fi sh
i s scared by the slightest ripple . When these thoughts
are in embryo, even the infinitesimal attention required
for talking cannot be spared’; and a writer on Mon¬
taigne in The Times Literary Supplement for January 31,
1924, says, ‘We all indulge in the strange pleasant pro¬
cess called thinking, but when it comes to saying, even
to some one opposite, what we think, then how little we
are able to convey! The phantom is through the mind
and out of the window before we can lay salt on its tail,
or slowly sinking and returning to the profound dark¬
ness which it has lit up momentarily with a wandering
light/ In the case of a poet, this danger is increased by

1 See Paul Chabanei, Le Subconscient chez les Artistes , etc. (quoted
by H. A. Bruce, Psychology and Parenthood , p. 90).

2 Quoted by H. A. Bruce, Psychology and Parenthood (1915), p. 88.

106 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch.4

the fact that for the poet the finding of expressive words
is an integral part of the more or less automatic thought-
process indicated by Intimation. The little girl had the
making of a poet in her who, being told to be sure of
her meaning before she spoke, said, ‘How can I know
what I think till I see what I say?’ A modern professed
t hinker must, however, sooner or later in the p rocess of
thought, make the conscious effort of expression, with
all its r isks . A distant ancestor of ours, some Aurig-
nacian Shelley, living in the warm spell between two
ice ages, may have been content to lie on the hillside,
and allow the songs of the birds and the loveliness of
the clouds to mingle with his wonder as to the nature
of the universe in a delightful uninterrupted stream of
rising and falling reverie, enjoyed and forgotten as it
passed. But the mo dern thinker has gen.erally_accepte<I,
willingly or unwillingly, the task of making per manent
his thought for the use of others, as the only justifica¬
tion of his position in a society few of whose members
have time or opportunity for anything but a l ife of
manual labour .

The interference of our will should, finally, vary -
with the variations of the subject-matter of our thought
— not only in respect of the point in time at which it
should take place, but also in respect to the element in
a complex thought-process with which we should inter¬
fere. A novelist who had just finished a long novel, and
who must constantly have employed his conscious will
while writing it, to make sure of a good idea or phrase,
or to improve a sentence, or rearrange an incident, told

Ch. 4 STAGES OF CONTROL 107

me that he had spoilt his book by interfering with the
automatic development of his main story and of its chief
characters, in order to follow out a preconceived plot.
Dramatists and poets constantly speak of the need of
allowing their characters to ‘speak for themselves’; and
a creative artist often reaches maturity only when he has
learnt so to use his conscious craftsmanship in the ex¬
pression of his thought as not to silence the promptings
of that imperfectly co-ordinated whole which is called
his personality. It is indeed at the stage of Illumination
with its fringe of Intimation that the thinker should
most constantly realize that the rules of his art will be
of little effect unless they are applied with artistic
delicacy of apprehension.

V

THOUGHT AND EMOTION

‘/ thought . . . that an artist's instinct may sometimes be
worth the brains of a scientist , that both have the same 'pur¬
pose, the same nature , and that perhaps in time , as their
methods becoyne perfect , they are destined to become one vast
prodigious force which now it is difficult even to imaginel
{Tchehov to Grigorovitcli , 1887, Tchehov’s Letters,
translated by Constance Garnett , 1920, p. 76.)

I have already pointed out (p. 98) that the Intimation
of a coming thought may be ‘coloured’ by an ‘emotion’

or ‘feeling,’ or, to use a more technical and more inclu¬
sive term, an ‘affect.’ One of the most difficult prob -
lems in the voluntary control of the thought-process

arises from this fact. A poet who desires to retain an
emotionaliy-coloured Intimation for a period long
enough to enable it to turn into a fully developed and
verbally expressed thought, will find that it is extra¬
ordinarily hard to do so. If he makes a direct effort to
retain his emotion, the emotion may flit away. As
Blake says:

‘He who bends to himself a Joy
Doth the winged life destroy.’

On this point the laboratory psychologists have car¬
ried out certain introspective experiments whose results

108

THOUGHT AND EMOTION

Ch. 5

109

may help us. They have compared the influence of
voluntary attention upon a sensation with its influence
upon an affect; and they have found that under labora¬
tory conditions, it is easier to retain an affect indirectly
by concentrating attention on the sensation which may
have stimulated it than by attending directly to the
affect itself. E. B. T itc h ener (Feeling and Attention ,
1908, p. 69) says that ‘affections lack what all sensa¬
tions possess, the attribute of clearness. Attention to a
sensation means always that the sensation becomes
clear; attention to an affection is impossible. If it is
attempted, the pleasantness or unpleasantness eludes
us and disappears,’and quotes Kiilpe’s statements: ‘It
is a familiar fact that contemplation of the feelings, the
devotion of special attention to them, lessens their in¬
tensity, and prevents their natural expression,’ and
‘While pleasure and pain are brought far more vividly
to consciousness by the concentration of attention upon
their concomitant sensations, they disappear entirely
when we succeed (and we can succeed only for a
moment) in making the feeling as such the object of
attentive observation’ {ibid., pp. 70 and 71). Kiilpe and
Titchener are both thinking mainly of the particular
kinds of ‘affect’ which are called pleasure and pain, or
pleasantness and unpleasantness; but what they say is
to a large extent true of all those other affective types of
consciousness, which are so easy to distinguish from
each other in a text-book, and so difficult to distinguish
while watching one’s own mind.

A new thought may not only be preceded or accom-

no THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. 5

panied by an affect, but may also be accompanied by,
or may consist of, a visual or audile ‘image.’ Instances
may then occur where the affect is clearer and more
lasting than the ‘image’ associated with it. This may
happen when the association between the two has taken
place in actual sleep — as when we awake from a dream
with a feeling of terror, but having forgotten what
frightened us. Or the image may be a picture that has
only incompletely and with difficulty been made visible
to the mind by a severe effort of concentration, but
which is accompanied by an unusually intense and
vivid emotion. The emotional effect of Dante’s poetry
upon his readers is largely due to the amazing clearness
of his power of sensory imagination, but even Dante
found it easier to retain the passion of the final Beatific
Vision in Paradise than the Vision itself. In the last
canto of the Commedia he writes: ‘As is he who dreaming
sees, and when the dream is gone the passion stamped
remains, and nought else comes to the mind again; even
such am I, for almost wholly fails me my vision, yet
does the sweetness that was born of it still drip within
my heart. So does the snow unstamp itself to the sun,
so to the wind on the light leaves was lost the Sybil’s
wisdom.’ 1 The general testimony, however, of poets
and imaginative thinkers is that the retention by the
thinker of his emotion and its effective communication
to others is most likely to take place when it is associ¬
ated with a vivid and easily retained image — w hen, that
is to say, the psychological events follow the primitive
1 Paradiso, Canto XXXIII, 55-67.

Ill

Ch. 5 THOUGHT AND EMOTION

cycle of sensation, emotion , thought. 1 Milton, in his
famous description of poetry as ‘simple, sensuous and
passionate,’ puts the simple clearness of the associated
sensory image”' before the passion. Tchehov wrote
to Gorky: ‘You are an artist . . •. you feel superbly.
You are plastic; that is, when you describe a thing
you see and touch it with your hands. That is real
writing.’ 2

For ten years, from the age of nine to nineteen, I
spent a quite considerable number of hours in each
week in the composition of Latin and Greek verses.
For four of those years I was in the Sixth Form of
Shrewsbury School, which then had something like a
monopoly of the Cambridge University prizes in clas¬
sical versification. We were told that if we were to suc¬
ceed in gaining these prizes, or the college classical
scholarships, we must use in our verses particular in¬
stead of general terms. We must say ‘Tuscan’ or
‘Adriatic’ Sea, instead of ‘sea,’ ‘ilex’ instead of ‘tree,’
and ‘nightingale’ or ‘dove’ instead of‘bird.’ We did so,
choosing sometimes, when our memory failed us, some
word in the ‘Gradus’ containing the right number of
short and long syllables. Why we were to do so, neither
we nor our Headmaster (who had won more verse-
prizes with, it seemed to me, less poetic sensibility than
anyone else in the long history of Cambridge scholar¬
ship) had the least idea. Because Catullus in the Troad
could shut his eyes, and feel his heart stir as he saw

1 Sec above, pp. 30 and 41.

2 Quoted by J. M. Murry, The Problem of Style , p. 14.

I 12

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. 5

again the view from his villa at Sirmio, because Horace
was best inspired with the snows of Soracte before him,
and Virgil when he remembered the kindly smoke-
pillars of the Mantuan farms, therefore we were to
write down syllables indicating places on the map which
we have never seen, and the names of trees and flowers
which we would not have recognized at Kew Gardens.

It is this emotional factor which constitutes a large
part of the difficulty in choosing, when choice is pos¬
sible, the language we should use in thought. One lan¬
guage, or nuance of language, may enable our prob¬
lems to be more exactly stated, and our Verification to
be more successful; but another may possess for us
emotional associations which are more likely to lead to
new and vivid thoughts. When I was giving, some
months ago, a short course in London University based
on the material of this book, a very intelligent American
graduate student reproached me for attempting to state
psychological problems in ‘vernacular’ language. I
could only answer that the enormous technical vocabu¬
lary used in many American psychological laboratories
may (providing one recognizes that the vocabulary of
one laboratory often differs from that of another) lead
to greater exactness of thought; but that in this par¬
ticular case, where my purpose was the exploring of a
rather new problem, I believed that for me that advan¬
tage was less than the advantage of the more vernacular
language, with its greater range of emotional, and,
therefore, of intellectual associations. For in the ‘tele-
o phone-exchange’ of our brain, just as an idea may

Ch. 5 THOUGHT AND EMOTION 113

cull up an emotion, so an emotion may call up an_
i dea._

Besides the problem of the relation betwen ‘vernacu¬
lar’ and technical vocabularies, thinkers and writers
have sometimes to choose between a ‘literary’ language
which has acquired exact meaning and wide intellectual
associations, but which is tending to lose its emotional
associations, and a less exact unliterary language with
vivid emotional associations. Those countries are, in ¬
deed, extraordinarily fortunate, where, as in Russia and
Norway, literary and popular speech keep close to¬
gether . Sometimes the two forms of speech end by
becoming two languages. D ante had to choose between
t he scholastic thought of his Latin De Monarchia , and
t he richer tho ught of his Italian Commedia . Petrarch
never realized that his Latin epic Africa , on which,
rather than his Canzoniere , he rested his own claim to
immortality, illustrated every possible bad effect of
language upon thought.

A more difficult case is presented when a people with
a larger literature has conquered but not absorbed a
people with a smaller literature in its own vernacular,
especially if that vernacular has two forms, an older
literary, and a newer popular form. At this moment,
in Ireland, Czecho-Slovakia, and other parts of Europe,
peoples whose technical and even literary language has
for long been that of their conquerors, are deciding
whether they should continue to use that language, with
its advantages for exact thought and wide intercom¬
munication, or should develop a more or less sub-

H

ii+ THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. 5

merged vernacular. Each case must be decided on its
merits, and the only point on which I myself feel sure
is that when an old language is no longer in any true
sense a vernacular, but has become a mere field for
school-culture and literary study, like Sanscrit in India,
and Gaelic in Brittany and in most parts of Ireland, the
balance of advantage is against its revival for the general
purposes of thought and communication. Not only do
such revivals add new obstacles to intellectual intercourse
between nations and races and offer new temptations to
the oppression of minorities, but the obvious defects of
such a revived language in fullness and exactness are
not compensated for by its sometimes forced emotional
associations. Perhaps, if ever the hatreds of Versailles
die away, the League of Nations may find itself discuss¬
ing seriously whether a deliberately invented inter¬
national language, with its obvious advantages in exact¬
ness and universal intelligibility, and its obvious disad¬
vantages in emotional associations, may be worth the
trouble involved in inducing the schools of the civilized
world to teach it, in addition to the local vernaculars, to
students likely to be engaged in commerce, scientific
study, and the interpretation of legal and diplomatic
documents. If it were decided to adopt such a language,
new poems might after a generation be written in it,
and after a century or two it might acquire such wide
emotional association as to be suitable for general use.

In considering the emotional-intellectual influence of
language, it has been convenient to think of all kinds of
emotion as constituting together a single species. But

THOUGHT AND EMOTION

Ch. 5

”5

t here are certain emoti ons who se influence on thoug ht
can only be understood if we examine them separat ely.
Take, for instance, that curious psy chological fact
(existing, apparently, only in mankind) called the sensje
qf_.Humoatr, or of the Ridiculous. It begins with the
uproarious laughter of a little child who has just dis¬
covered that he can do a new trick or can recognize a
new likeness between words and things. At this point
it is exactly described by Hobbes’s defini tion of laugh ¬
ter as ‘sudden glory ’ ( Leviathan , Chap. VI). It always
retains this quality of representing a sudden burst into
a new train of association; but in later life the feeling
of release which accompanies the sense of Humour is
closely connected with the fact that our thought has
burst through some ‘censorship,’ some barrier, often
unknown to ourselves, of custom, or morals, or self¬
esteem. Galileo found that his sense of humour was
invaluable in clearing away for himself and his readers
the mental and emotional obstacles which mediaeval
tradition had built up across that path of logical infer¬
ence which led to the Copernican astronomy.

Now that the Inquisition has passed, the need of a
trained and courageous sense of Humour in the
students of natural science is not so obvious as it was
in the seventeenth century; but Humour is still a
powerful instrument for clearing out what Carlyle
called ‘the dead pedantries, unveracities, indolent
somnolent impotences, and accumulated dung-moun¬
tains’ 1 of scientific as well as social, political, and re-
1 Latter Day Pamphlets (edition of 1885), Downing Street, p. 113.

ii 6

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. 5

ligious thought. A watchful awareness, indeed, of all
Intimation that is coloured by Humour is an invaluable
acquirement for any thinker who, whether as writer or
organizer or teacher, has to deal with mankind, and
with all the instincts and habits which arise from the
fact that mankind are a semigregario us specie s prone to
follow loyalties and solemnities even when the loyalities

and solemnities have lost their original usefulness. I

have before me a volume of caricatures from the
Munich journal Simplicissimus during the years 1903 to
1914; and it is astonishing to see with what precise
accuracy the young humorists were able to observe and
communicate facts about the personalities and policies
of the Kaiser and his son which every German would
now recognize, but which were then hidden from al¬
most every responsible German statesman. Mr. Wil¬
liam Nicholson, in the New Review of June, 1897,
guided by a delicate and kindly sense of Humour, pub¬
lished that charming woodcut of Queen Victoria walk¬
ing with her Scotch terrier, which began the process,
since carried on by Mr. Lytton Strachey, of freeing us
from the enormous unrealities of the Jubilees of 1887
and 1897. O ne sometimes fee lsJdiatJfLmankinijwere
deprived of the sense of Humour ( which is not the same
thing as the habit of repeating funny stories) and were
reduced in that respect to the condition of the late Mr.
W. J. Bryan, all progress in social, political, or religious
thought might become impossible in America.

We generally assume that Humour requires only an
inborn faculty combined with the encouragement of

THOUGHT AND EMOTION

Ch. 5

ii 7

a free-speaking and free-thinking group of friends.
But every humorist, if he is to develop, and still more if
he is to retain after middle life his sense of Humour,
requires a long succession of little acts of personal
daring. He has not onl y to recognize in himsel f what
W. K. Clifford called ‘t he still small voice that whispers
fiddle stick s/ but also to insist on letting it speak out in
spite of the forces within him that would silence it. He
has to acquire the habit of treating every Intimation
which comes to him with the colour of Humour as a
challenge to his courage. Think, for instance, of the
quiet heroism which enabled Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith
to bring into full consciousness the following little
mental experience, which most of us would have in¬
stantly huddled away from the fringe of subconscious¬
ness into complete forgetfulness. He calls it ‘The
Goat/ and says: ‘In the midst of my anecdote a sudden
misgiving chilled me — had I told them about this Goat
before? And then, as I talked, there gaped on me-
abyss opening beneath abyss — a darker speculation:
when goats are mentioned do I automatically and al¬
ways tell this story about the Goat at Portsmouth P’ 1
Mr. Winston Churchill, in his World Crisis —1915
(1923), p. 21, has a sentence which admirably indicates
the importance in war of the courageous following of
Humour: ‘Nearly all the battles which are regarded as
masterpieces of the military art, from which have been
derived the foundation of states and the fame of com¬
manders, have been battles of manoeuvre, in which very
1 Trivia , 1918, p. 90.

118 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. 5

often the enemy has found himself defeated by some
novel expedient or device, some queer, swift, unex¬
pected thrust or strategem.’ The whole peace-training
of the typical British officer is apt to prevent him from
attempting to overcome in time of war his subconscious
shrinking from any of those ‘queer’ things (like the
tanks) which are felt as somehow part of the ‘bad
form’ that may in the end destroy all the decent
solemnities of military life. But the sense of Humour,
like every other element in thought, requires for its
effective use not the following of a mechanically uni¬
form rule but the delicate manipulation of a varied art.
Perhaps no English writer has so fine a natural gift of
Humour as Mr. G. K. Chesterton, and his readers are
often thankful to him for breaking his way by that gift
towards new truth. Yet his books sometimes force one
to realize that Humour without the patient effort of
systematic exploration may be as misleading as patient
effort without Humour.

And Humour is not the only emotion which we
should learn to recognize habitually as a hint of truth,
to be used skilfully rather than followed blindly. I
have already (p. 75) referred to the part played in
Henri Poincare’s mathematical thinking by the aesthetic
emotion of beauty. When one reads A Passage to India
by Mr. E. M. Forster (1924), who has developed his
natural sensitiveness by habitually watching all the
emotionally coloured fringes of his consciousness, one
realizes that the history of British administration in
India might have been different if a larger proportion

Ch. 5 THOUGHT AND EMOTION 1x9

of our Anglo-Indian officials and soldiers had submitted
themselves to the same form of self-training. In the
tense atmosphere which is so finely indicated by his
description of the garden-party given by the English
Club at Chandrapore to their native fellow-subjects, one
seems to detect the terrific effort of habitual suppres¬
sion, by which alone the hosts in that uncomfortable
ceremony are enabled to drive beneath the level of their
full consciousness a score of ‘still small voices/ that
wo uld whisper, if they were allowed to do so, of the
shortness of human life , evanescence of empires,
and the intellectual possibilities of unbuttoned sym r
path y.

Indeed, now that psychologists arc abandoning the
simplified conceptions of reason as ‘the slave of passion/
or instinct as a force which mechanically drives the
otherwise inert t hinking brain, it is becoming more and
more necessary that we should reconsider in detail the
relation, in the processes of intellectual inference and

practical decision, of emotion and associat ive thought^

An emotionally coloured Intimation may be the first
indication, not merely that we attach this or that
‘value’ to an intellectual conclusion formed without the
help of emotion, but that our intellectual and emotional
being has, by a process of which we are only partially
conscious, come as a whole to that conclusion, and that
the final stage of conscious Verification may now begin.
When I once asked the best administrator whom I
knew how he formed his decisions, he laughed, and, with
the air of letting out for the first time a guilty secret,

120 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. 5

said: ‘Oh, I always decide by feeling. So and so always
decides by calculation, and that is no good.’ When,
again, I asked an American judge, who is widely
admired both for his skill and for his impartiality, how
he and his fellows formed their conclusions, he also
laughed, and said that he should be stoned in the street
if it were known that, after listening with full conscious¬
ness to all the evidence, and following as carefully as he
could all the arguments, he waited until he ‘felt’ one
way or the other. Such a ‘feeling’ will not, however,
give rise to an effective new thought unless it is some¬
thing deeper than an intellectual opinion that one ought
to feel. I remember that a small nephew of mine said
of the rather ill-tempered family dog: ‘O f cou rse I l ove
Pilot, but 1 don’t like him.’ Ir my nephew had become
a poet, or a naturalist, or an Under-Secretary of State,
that feeling which he called ‘liking’ might have helped
to form his style or drive his thoughts to their conclu¬
sion; w hile the iove’ which he merely knew tha t he
ou ght to feel might have been a functionless ornament
of his mind.

There is one emotionally-coloured Intimation which

is so important in poetry that sensitiveness to it almost

constitutes the special poetic gift. It is a feeling of the
, universal significance of some clearly-realized sensory
i mage . Professor F. C. Prescott, the author of The
Poetic Mind (1922), describes this feeling in the case of
a poetically-minded man who is not a poet. Pie says
that we ‘suddenly find the scene before us, fields, trees,
and sky, clothed in a strange appearance, coloured by a

THOUGHT AND EMOTION

Ch. 5

12 1

strange light, taking us back to childhood or forward to
another world, we hardly know which’ (p. 13). Baude¬
laire says: ‘In certain states of the soul the profound
significance of life is revealed completely in the
spectacle, however commonplace, that is before one’s
eyes; it becomes the symbol of this significance.’ 1 The
force and depth of this Intimation may be due to its
close relation t o one of the most fujndamental processes
of life . A living organi sm — from the sim plest pro-
tozoon to the most complex mammal — can only exist
in the world on condition that it recognizes likenesses

in its environment, the likeness of one scrap of food to
another, or of one enemy to another of the same or a
similar species. 2 That recognition must have preceded
by long ages the dominance and even the first appear¬
ance either of the upper brain or of that continuous con¬
sciousness which the upper brain made possible. The
Intimation, therefore, that we are about to make a new
vast recognition of likeness - that we are about, as
Plato would say, to behold the eternal pattern of which
the confused likenesses between individual phenomena
are clumsy copies — moves our whole being. Aristotle
goes far to explain the special emotion which much of
the finest poetry excites, when he says that ‘Metaphor
is the special mark of genius, for the power of making a
good metaphor is the power of recognizing likeness.’ 3

1 Quoted by J. Middleton Murry, The Problem of Style, pp. 27
and 28.

2 See my Huma?i Nature in Politics, Chap. II.

3 Aristotle, Poetics (Butcher’s translation, p. 87).

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA SCHOOL
OF THEOLOGY LIBRARY

i22 'THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. 5

This Intimation of significance may either appear as
a feeling of the relation of some material object before
us to the whole universe, Blake’s power

‘T o see a wo rld in a grain of sand,

And a heaven in a wild flower;

H old infinity in the palm of y our hand
And eternity in an hour.’

Or it may be a sudden sense that some commonplace
fact or saying has a new and intenser individual mean¬
ing, as when Hamlet cries:

‘My tables-meet it is I set it down,

That one may smile and smile and be a villain.

At least I’m sure it may be so in Denmark.’

But strong and deep as this feeling is, our conscious-
ness of it is often curiously evanescent . Hamlet may
find himself staring at the scribbled words on his tables,
while the emotion which accompanied the writing of
them a moment ago has already sunk beneath conscious¬
ness. W illiam James (who might have been a great
poet) in that chapter of his Principles which I have
already quoted, speaks of our awareness of‘a passage, a
relation, a transition’ in our tho ught. ‘If,’ he says, ‘our
purpose is nimble enough, and we do arrest it, it ceases
forthwith to be itself. As a snowflake crystal caught in
the w r arm hand is no longer a crystal but a drop, so,
instead of catching the feeling of relation moving to its
term, we find that we have caught some substantive
thing, usually the last word we were pronouncing,

Ch. 5 THOUGHT AND EMOTION 123

statically taken, and with its function, tendency and
particular meaning in the sentence quite evaporated.’ 1

Sometimes a poet strives to retain this special Intima¬
tion of significance long enough to allow it to develop
into the formation and expression of a new thought,
and does so by concentrating his attention upon the
‘sensuous’ image that evokes it. Mr. Drinkwater, for
instance, in his ‘Petition’ prays:

. . . ‘that I may see the spurge upon the wall
And hear the nesting birds give call for call
Keeping my wonder new.’ 2

Poets, indeed, spend their lives in capturing for
themselves and making permanent for their readers
emotionally coloured Intimations which most of us no
more notice than we notice the shifting clouds in the
strip of sky above our street. Sometimes the poet so
describes the Intimation itself as to communicate the
emotional colour of it to his hearers or readers, and
leaves the emerging thought to develop in their minds.
Shakespeare, in the great tragedies of his later period,
showed an amazing power of doing this. If we read
or hear Macbeth’s speech, ‘To-morrow and to-morrow
and to-morrow — ’ on being told of his wife’s death, or
Hamlet’s ‘How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem
to me all the uses of this world,’an emotion stimulating
a new thought is started in ourselves, and is deepened
and maintained both by the music of Shakespeare’s

1 W. James, Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, p. 244.

2 J. Drinkwater, Olson Pools (1912), p. 42.

124 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. 5

words, and by the intense reality of his images — the
‘poor player,’ the ‘brief candle,’ the ‘tale told by an
idiot.’

If, however, we substitute a conscious and mechani¬
cal theory of symbolism for this spontaneous experience
of Intimation, the true feeling of significance, and
its power to stimulate creative thought, at once
depart. I remember a conversation with Dr. Tsai, the
head of the Government University in Pekin, and a
leading authority on Chinese aesthetics. An English
friend and I had been asking him whether a new great
period of Chinese art might be approaching, and in
particular whether a revival of the Buddhist faith might
not lend a new significance to Chinese pictures of
mountains and pilgrims. ‘No,’ he answered, if I may
interpret his interpreter, ‘the whole tradition of Chinese
art depends on the fact that the significance of the
thing seen arises from the intensity of its individual
reality. If the artist consciously draws his mountain as
a Buddhist heaven, it will lose its essential moun-
taineity; and the old man who is painted as a Buddhist
saint will lose the intensity, and, therefore, the signifi¬
cance of his “old-mannedness.”

In the history of literary criticism all forms of
Intimation and Illumination arc usually indicated by
the single vague word Imagination ; and during the
hundred years from the publication of Edward Young’s
Conjectures on Original Corn-position in 1759, to that
of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, Imagination
was sharply contrasted with Reasoning or Reason.

Ch. 5 THOUGHT AND EMOTION 125

If a modern psychologist compares Imagination with
Reason, he will do so in order to indicate different stages
and purposes in associative thought, emphasizing, by
the word Imagination, the stage of Illumination, and
that awareness of the less-conscious fringe of thought
which I have called Intimation, combined with the
purpose of artistic creation; and by the word Reason
emphasizing the stages which I have called Prepara¬
tion and Verification, and the purpose of arriving at con¬
clusions on which it is safe to act. B ut in the confu sed
co ntroversy , a century ago, in Germany, England, and
France, between the ‘classicists’ and the Romanticists, 1
the words Imagination and Reason were used to mean
an opposition between two mutually exclusive processes.
Imagination was, to the writers of that time, an out¬
burst of the uncontrollable forces which in some
mysterious way produced beauty and significance in
poetry. Reason was a fully conscious and fully volun¬
tary process either of discovering the logical implica¬
tions of accepted truth, or of so arranging the results of
observation as to lead directly and inevitably to new
truth. This opposition is admirably illustrated by a
comparison of Shelley’s letters in 1811 with his essay on
‘The Defence of Poetry’ written in 1821. We should
now say that Shelley in those ten years made an enor¬
mous advance in his practice of the art of thought by
recognizing and emphasizing Intimation and Illumina-

1 See the admirable Tract XVII (by Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith) of
the Society for Pure English (Clarendon Press, 1924) on the history
of the four words, Romantic, Originality, Creative, Genius.

126

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. 5

tion as a necessary stage in the process of thought;
Shelley himself described the change as the abandon¬
ment of Reason and the adoption of Imagination.

Shelley was expelled from Oxford on March 25,
1811, on the delation of Edward Coplestone (then
Oxford Professor of Poetry, 1 and later Bishop of
Llandaff), for publishing anonymously certain objec¬
tions, which no one at Oxford had answered for him, to
the current apologetics of orthodox Christianity. It
had, therefore, fallen to him as a boy of eighteen to be a
standard-bearer and martyr of Reason. He had studied
during his few months at Oxford the grim syllogisms
of Godwin’s Political Justice . On June 11, 1811, he
wrote to Elizabeth Hitchener, the first new friend he
had made since his expulsion, T am now an undivided
votary of reason.’ 2 He believed, however, that in
following reason he was giving up for ever both
imagination and joy. Towards the end of his letter to

1 See Shelley’s letter to Godwin, Jan. 10, 1812: ‘Mr. Coplestone at
Oxford, among others, had the pamphlet; he showed it to the Master
and the Fellows of University College, and I was sent for’ (Ingpen,
Letters of P. B. Shelley, 1915, Vol. I, p. 220). Coplestone was Profes¬
sor of Poetry at Oxford, 1802-12. He published in 1813 the Latin
lectures which he had given, at the rate of one a term, during his pro¬
fessorship. The lecture which he must have given in the term when he
caused Shelley to be expelled is entitled Tabulae Mythological,’ and he
explains (p. 410) that he refers to ‘those fables, handed down from
extreme antiquity, which a too credulous age used to receive from their
parents and held to be sacred’ (trans.) — which is very like a passage in
Shelley’s pamphlet.

2 See Mrs. Olwen Campbell’s admirable psychological study, Shelley
and the Unromantics (1924), p. 122.

THOUGHT AND EMOTION

Ch. 5

127

Miss Hitchener he wrote: ‘I recommend reason.
Why? Is it because, since I have devoted myself un¬
reservedly to its influencing I have never felt happiness?
I have rejected all fancy, all imagination; I find that all
pleasure resulting to self is thereby annihilated’ (Camp¬
bell, p. 94).

Part of his mental suffering during that spring was
due to the fact that when he looked into his mind the
clear-cut distinctions of Godwin’s logic were constantly
obscured by vague emotional Intimations. He wrote
to Miss Hitchener (June 20, 18 r 1): ‘We find ourselves
reasoning upon the mystery which involves our being
. . . we see virtue and vice, we see light and darkness,
each is separate, distinct; the line which divides them
is glaringly perceptible; yet how racking it is to the soul,
when inquiring into its own operations, to find that
perfect virtue is very far from being attainable, to find
reason tainted by feeling, to see the mind when analysed
exhibit a picture of irreconcilable inconsistences, even
when perhaps a moment before, it imagined that it had
grasped the fleeting Phantom of virtue.’ 1 In July he
went for a holiday to Rhayader in South Wales, and
wrote to Miss Hitchener: ‘Nature is here marked with
the most impressive character of loveliness and
grandeur; once I was tremendously alive to tones and
scenes . . . the habit of analysing feelings I fear does
not agree with this. It [i.e. feeling] is spontaneous, and,
when it becomes subject to consideration, ceases to

1 Ingpen, Letters of P. B. Shelley (1915), Vol. I, p. 88, and Camp¬
bell, loc. cit., p. 95.

128

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. 5

exist. . . . But you do right to indulge feeling where it
does not militate with reason. I wish I could too.’ 1

In Shelley’s letters we can also see some of the steps
that led to the change from what he called Reason to
what he called Imagination. In the winter of 1814—15
he began to produce real poetry. On December 11,
1817, he wrote to Godwin: ‘I am formed, if for any¬
thing not in common with the herd of mankind, to
apprehend minute and remote distinctions of feeling,
whether relative to external nature or the living beings
which surround us, and to communicate the concep¬
tions which result from considering either the moral or
the material universe as a whole.’ 2 In 1812 he went to
Italy, where, in addition to writing poetry of rapidly
increasing power and beauty, he translated the Sym¬
posium of Plato and studied the Phadrus. In August,
18 r8, he wrote to Peacock, under the influence of
Plato’s theory of poetry as the supreme form of intel¬
lectual creation, and quotes Tasso: ‘There is no one in
the world who deserves the name of Creator but God
and the Poet.’ (Ingpen, Vol. II, p. 615.)

In 1821 he wrote his Defence of Poetry , which ought
to be read and re-read by every student of the psycho¬
logy of thought. He still t hinks of Imagina tion (or
Poetry), with its quality of involuntary inspiration, as
so methin g to be distinguished from the completely

1 Ingpen, loc. cit., Vol. I, p. 122. Ingpen points out {Ibid, p. 91)
that in Shelley’s letters to Miss Hitchener ‘the dots are not to be taken
as signs of omission, but as Shelley’s mode of punctuation.’

? Ingpen, loc. cit., Vol, II, p. 574.

Ch. 5 THOUGHT AND EMOTION 129

voluntary but mechanical process of Reasoning.
‘Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted
according to the determination of the will. A man can¬
not say “I will compose poetry.” The greatest poet even
cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading
coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant
wind, awakens totransitory brightness; this power arises
from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and
changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions
of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach
or its departure.’ [Shelley s Works , H. B. Forman, 1880,
Vol. Ill, p. 137). Reason is now to him a mechanical
process of calculation, which if it co-operates with
Imagination must do so as a subordinate instrument.
‘Reason,’ he writes in the openingof his essay, ‘is the enu¬
meration of quantities already known; imagination is the
perception of the value of those quantities, both sepa¬
rately and as a whole. Reason respects the differences,
and imagination the similitudes of things. Reason is to
imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to
the spirit, as the shadow to the substance’ [Ibid., p. 100).

As the essay proceeds, he comes constantly nearer to
Plato’s claim that Poetry includes in itself all the neces¬
sary elements of thought, that Poetry, in the large sense
in which he uses the word, is a harmony of those ele¬
ments, and that if rightly used it offers to mankind
guidance both for individual and for social life. 1

1 In ‘Hellas/ written a few months later than the Defence of Poetry,
he definitely speaks of imagination and reason as well as will and passion
as elements in the whole process of thought:

I

THE ART OF THOUGHT

130

Ch. 5

‘Poetry,’ he says, ‘compels us to feel that which we per¬
ceive, and to imagine that which we know. It creates
anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our
minds by the recurrence of impressions blasted by
reiteration’ (p. 140). ‘It is at once the centre and cir¬
cumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends
all science, and that to which all science must be re¬
ferred’ (p. 136).

Shelley wrote his Defence of Poetry at a moment in
the history of the world curiously like the present. The
great Napoleonic War had been concluded, five years
before, by a victorious Peace. There had been during
the preceding generation an immense increase ofhuman
knowledge and particularly of the sciences applicable to
the production of wealth. But victory in war and the
possession of new power over nature had been accom¬
panied by an actual diminution of the happiness and
worth of human life. The cause of this is, says Shelley,
that statesmen and manufacturers have not learnt from
the poets the art of recognizing and retaining the signi¬
ficance of that which they see: ‘The cultivation of
poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when,

‘Thought

Alone, and its quick elements, Will, Passion,
Reason, Imagination, cannot die;

They are, what that which they regard appears.
The stuff whence mutability can weave
All that it has dominion o’er, worlds, worms.
Empires and superstitions.’

(Hellas, 11 . 795-801.)

Ch. 5 THOUGHT AND EMOTION 131

from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle,
the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed
the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the
internal law of human nature’ (p. 136). ‘Whilst the
mechanist abridges, and the political economist com¬
bines labour, let them beware that their speculations,
for want of correspondence with those first principles
which belong to the imagination, do not tend, as they
have in modern England, to exasperate at once the
extremes of luxury and want. They have exemplified
the saying, “To him that hath, more shall be given, and
from him that hath not, the little that he hath shall be
taken away.” The rich have become richer, and the
poor have become poorer; and the vessel of the State is
driven between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and
despotism’ (p. 132). ‘We want the creative faculty to
imagine that which we know; we want the generous
impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the
poetry of life’ (p. 13 5). ‘We have more moral, political,
and historical wisdom than we know how to reduce into
practice; we have more scientific and economical know¬
ledge than can be accommodated to the just distribu¬
tion of the produce which it multiplies’ (p. 134).

As one reads the last pages of the Defence of
Poetry one begins to see light on that dark saying of
Aristotle, ‘Poetry, therefore, is more philosophic and a
higher thing than history, for poetry tends to express
the universal and history the particular.’ 1 Shelley
himself ends his essay with the words ‘Poets are the
1 Butcher’s translation of the Poetics, p. 35.

THE ART OF THOUGHT

132

Ch. 5

unacknowledged legislators of the world’ (p. 144) 1 ;
and the historians who know most of the struggle which
saved England from the worst consequences of the

Industrial Revolution k now that that struggle repre ¬
s ented a victory of those who c ould imagine its results
in terms of human life over those who could only

calculate percentages of commercial profit and loss.
And, in our time, if Europe escapes the worst conse¬
quences of the Congress of Versailles, that fact will be
ascribed by future historians not so much to the in¬
numerable professional calculators who accompanied
each national delegation, as to Mr. J. M. Keynes, who
could ‘imagine what he knew,’ and who in his Economic
Consequences of the Peace dared to quote Shelley.

1 It is an indication of the sense in which Shelley uses the word
Poetry in his Defence of Poetry that this sentence forms part of a passage
taken almost verbatim from his Philosophical View of Reform (written
in 1820, but left unfinished, and not published till 1920), and that he
had originall y w ritten ‘ Poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged
legislators of the worl d’ (si Philosophical View of Reform, edited by
T. W. Rolleston, 1920, p. 30).

VI

THOUGHT AND HABIT

All the activities of a living org anism produce, besides
their immediate effects o n the organism and its environ- o
men t, l ater and more permanent effects on the future
behaviour^pattern of the organism. Every one , for
instance, o f our mental activities in the stages of Pre¬
paration, Incubation, Illumination, and Verification,
not only helps to produce an immediate output of
successful thought, but leaves our organism more able_
and more inclined to repeat that activity in the future.

These later effects are called habits, and in discussing
possible improvements of the art of thought, while it is
sometimes more convenient to concentrate our atten-

tion on the original psychological activity and its im¬
mediate results, it is also sometimes convenient to con¬
centrate our attention (as I shall do in this chapter), on
the future habit as the end to be attained, and on the
activity itself as a means of creating that habit.

I will begin with the simplest cas e — the_ formation,
by voluntarily arranging the hours of intellectual work,
of a habit of respon ding in the process of associative.
thought to a time~ stimulus. If, for instance, a man is
starting to write his first novel, it may seem very unim¬
portant whether he sits down to write at 9 a.m., or
6 a.m., or 8 p.m. But if, day by day, he chooses Q a.m, ,
he will find that the gradual st imulat ion of his th inking
into full activity which some writers call ‘warming up’

133

134 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch .6

will occur rather more easily and more quickly at tha t
hour than at any other hour of the dav : and in a few
weeks he will find that "warming up’ will tend to occur
almost automatically. ‘Warming up’ may then be pre-
—•'ceded by an automatic Intimation of its coming; and,
if he breakfasts at 8 a.m., he may at 8.45 a.m. begin to
wander about the house with that vague and slightly
idiotic exprcsgiaQ_QrL his face which is so irritating to
those members of his household on whom the daily
worries of housekeeping are just descending. In this
respect, it is a real advantage to a professional brain¬
worker to know, and to make part of his working con¬
sciousness, something of what I may call the physio-
^°g7> as distinguished from the psychology of thought.
IS o one, for instance, who is habitually aware of the pro¬
cess by which the activity of the brain is ‘warmed np ’
will be ‘fussed.’ or angry, or despair ing, if on any
particular day that process is slower than usual. He
will begin work on such a day patiently and q uietly,
and may find that the sense of vigour and reality in his
thinking comes to him, as sleep comes to a healthy and
tranquil boy, unobserved. In the same way, he will not
be frightened at the first appearance of mental fatigue,
but will plod on till his ‘second wind’ appea rs, and will
only abandon his work when it has lasted for what
experience tells him is the right number of hours, or
when he is sure that fatigue on this particular day will
not pass off.

S ometimes the time-habit is combi ned with a habit
of responding to a particular sensory stimu lus. Charles

i 35

Ch.6 THOUGHT AND HABIT

Dickens found that he started work best if he had c er¬
tain ornaments, arranged in a certain order, before, him
on~ ~his table . 1 Some men work better in the British*-"'
Museum Library than elsewhere. I myself find that
my newest, and therefore, most easily forgotten
thoughts tend to present themselves under the stimulus
of the first spongeful of water in my bath; but I have
never had the courage to search in the stationers’ shops
for a waterproof writing-tablet and pencil. A more
complex habit results when some daily repeated
muscular action stimulates the memory of the thought-
train on which we were engaged when we broke off
work the day before. A friend of mine, who is an
exceptionally fertile thinker and writer, tells me that he
gets started most easily if he begins by copying out the
last few sentences of yesterday’s work. Many intglr
l ectual workers regula rly beg in work by rereading tire
whole of what they wrote the d ay before. Varendonck,
for instance, says, 'IVly first work in the morning is to
reread what I wrote almost spontaneously the day
before; I complete, correct, re-arrange, reserve points
for later consideration, etc., till the whole produces a
logical impression’ (Day Dreams , p. 13^)- Rereading
often reveals the fact that the brain has been subcon¬
sciously exploring the material during the interval of
Incubation and sleep; and that that fact has made the
processes of arrangement, combination, and expression
much easier than they were when the words were first
written down. Rereading also often brings on an
1 John Forster, Life of Dickens (edition of 1911), Vol. II, p. 236.

Ch. 6

136 THE ART OF THOUGHT

Intimation indicating an uncompleted brain-activity
and the approach of a new thought; and we should
form the habit of making, when this Intimation appears,
a short voluntary extension of the interruption of
mental effort which I called Incubation. ‘If,’ says
Varendonck, the order in which I want to present the
different parts of my argumentation does not come for¬
ward at once foreconsciously, while I am reading them
over, I leave my desk for a moment to look after the fire,
or to play a tune on the piano or something of the sort.
And piovided I have been all this time in a half-dreamy
state, the order of presentation is usually ready in my
mind’s eye, without any apparent effort’ (Day Dreams,
p. 138).

In all this, however, we must be careful not to be¬
come the slaves of our habits. In writing a long book
it may be best on five days out of six to begin work by
picking up and developing the thoughts of the day
before. But on the sixth day it may be better to begin
by using our time-habit to surprise, at the moment of
warming up, our mental activity at a new and deeper
level, and so to capture some idea which mere industry
and regularity might never have brought to the surface.
In administrative work a daily break of this kind is very
often desirable. The administrative thinker has to deal
in succession, with many problems widely separated
fi_ojn each other. A rereading of the last memorandum
which he wrote yesterday may actually prevent him
from hitting on the problem which most needs to be
thought out to-day. And the_adm inistrator is peqiliarly

Ch. 6

THOUGHT AND HABIT

137

l iable to form slight emotional complexes which may

lialf-consciouslv 'head him off* from any path of thought

diverging from office routine. I have been told by a
colleague of Sir Warren Fisher how that great adminis¬
trator used to begin his day’s work during the most
critical months of the War. He used, I was told, to
come into his room, and stand with his back to the fire¬
place, without looking at the pile of official ‘jackets’
which lay, with green ‘urgency’ slips sticking out of
them, on his desk. Before him he would have a couple
of the highest officials in his department. Then, rous¬
ing himself and them to the full vitality of imagina¬
tion, he would say, ‘Now, you fellows, what is the most
essential thing for us to get done to-day?’ and only
when that was settled and arranged for would he go to
his desk. It might be extremely valuable if, before the
evidence is lost, some of those who know would make a
careful comparison between Sir Warren Fisher’s
methods and those by which Lord Kitchener at the
War Office earned the name of ‘Lord K. of Chaos.’ 1

The President of Harvard once described to me a

1 Sir William Beveridge, who has had great experience both of
administrative work and of the process of scientific investigation, wrote
in the Nation of May 1, 1924, advocating the appointment of an Econ¬
omic General Staff at the Board of Trade, who should arrange their
work and mental habits on scientific, rather than on administrative
lines. He said that the present high official advisers of the Government
‘are one and all absorbed in dail y admin istration - thatjjcadly foejo^
co ntinuous though t.* His proposal is a good one, but its adoption
should not be allowed to prevent ordinary administrative officials from
also forming as far as their work allows, ‘scientific’ habits of thought.

138 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch.6

mental expedient not unlike Sir Warren Fisher’s. He
said that he had tried to train himself to begin the da y
by doing what could be put off and leaving till later what
could not be put off . That which ‘can be put off’ means
not only that which will not be mechanically brought
forward by an interview already fixed or an urgent
letter on the desk; it also often means some question
which, without a special effort of volition, we should be
inclined to put off, a problem with slightly uncomfort¬
able associations, or an inchoate train of still vague and
only partially conscious thought which will drift into
forgetfulness unless the ‘salt-box’ is used. Mr. Walter
Lippmann found, after interviewing, as a journalist,
many American statesmen, that he could extract from
them, when they were off their guard and slightly ex¬
cited, thoughts infinitely more fruitful than the ordinary
commonplaces of politics. Fie asks (Tale Review , July
1922, p. 675), ‘What if it were possible, taking men as
they are, to liberate the possibilities that in moments of
candour are revealed!’ He is referring not merely to
the chance fact of such a liberation at any particular
moment, but to the possibility of creating among
American statesmen that subtle habit of overcoming
obstructive menta l complexes which we call ‘candour.’

There are writers and teachers the nature of whose
work makes it necessary for them to regulate their
intellectual life by strict routine, who must start, for
instance, daily at 9 a.m., to write three thousand words
of criticism or analysis of other men’s books, or to con¬
tinue a long series of calculations, or to correct a daily

Ch.6

THOUGHT AND HABIT

r 39

stint of students’ essays. E ach on e, however, even of
these men and women, i s not a machine, but aJiving
and_imperfectly unified organism, whose t hinking ran
be only partially controlled by order and forethought .

As they work, their whole nervous system may be half-
consciously quivering with old memories and new
associations and vague emotional Intimations. They
can, and, if they are to contribute to the thought of their
time, they should acquire the hahit nf watching the
unfocussed fringe of their consciousness for any sig ni- ’

ficant mental events which may appear there, without ^
diverting their main attention from their immediate
task; j ust as the fencer watches in the p eri phery of his
field of vision his opponent’s wrist for sig nifi.cantmove=.
ments without withdrawing the central focus of his fields
of vision from his opponent’s eyes. T hey will often b<? \
wise to jot down these fringe-thoughts in their first

rough form , and to leave them for future exam ination \

and elaboratio n.

And those, also, whose daily work requires a con¬
tinuous effort of inventive thought, should form the
same habit of watching and recording their fringe-
thoughts. Mr. H. Hazlitt in his Thinking as a Science
(1916) gives a description of this difficult process,
ending with the statement: ‘Having written the idea
you will have it off your mind’ (p. 77) — i.e. you will be
spared the effort of preventing yourself from forgetting
it. The professed thinker should also be habitually on
the look-out for the possibility that a fringe-thought
may sometimes be recognized as more important than

©

140

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch.6

the main thought-train during whose course it arises,
and that a temporary interruption of work may be desir¬
able, during which the fringe-th ought may b e develope d
/ as a focal thought. I have done my best of late years to
( f orm the habit of writing down sign ificant fringe -

\ t houghts between ‘square brackets ? on my writing-p ad
I while ‘reading up* a subject in a library.. They produce
'least interruption to the main course of attention when
they are put down in the actual words, almost unin¬
telligible to anyone else, with which they come into my
mind, and when even those words are economized by
the use of a sort of shorthand of logical symbols.
The fringe-thoughts will have no obvious connection
with the chapter which one is writing; and, therefore,
one should, perhaps once a week, run one’s eye over the
notes of the week’s work, and collect and rearrange the
bracketed entrie_s. Sometimes the mere fact of writing
-—*the fringe-thought down seems to set the subconscious
mind to work on it; aod the thought reappears at the
end of the week further developed, and accompanied by
an indication of its place in the main problem on which
one is engaged. Varendonck, describing such fringe-
thoughts, says: ‘These ideas coming to the surface, I
scribble them down as quickly as possible, trying to
write automatically. . . . When I have come to the end
of a section, I cast a glance over my list of foreconscious
ideas, and I find that nearly all of them have automati¬
cally found their natural place in the text. . . .’ (Day
Dreams , pp. 137—8). Fringe-thoughts, though they:
will generally find their place in some chapter before or

Ch .6

THOUGHT AND HABIT 141

after that on which the thinker is working, sometimes

will not; and anyone who is living a life of intellectual

production will do well to keep, as Darwin did, a_
rather considerable number of ‘folders’ or envelopes,
labelled with the names of subjects to which he finds his_
mind recurring, even although he may not immediately
contemplate writing, or lecturing, or acting, on them.^
He will find, again, that thoughts which first appeared
to be scattered and unconnected, will often tend to grow

out towards each oth er, and to fo rm n ew and unex- ,

pected connections. For this reason he should keep one
large folde r marked ‘Redistribute^’ into which he puts,
all thoughts that are felt to be significant, but which do
n ot seem to belong to any of the sections already
labelled, and from time to time go carefully through it,
It is just in such a collection that new ideas are most
likely to be found, and the recorded thoughts will at
least be connected with each other by the fact that they
have all appeared significant to t hat partially ^ unified
organism which is the thinker’s self.

The thinker should not, as Helmholtz found, con-

■(§>

*****

fine the process of recording his fringe-thoughts to the
moments in the day when he is accustomed to respond
to a time-stimulus, or when he is sitting at his desk or ^ JP-

laboratory bench. Hobbes’s custom of ke eping a little}
note-book where at any hour of the day one can un-1
obtrusively enter the thoughts that ‘dart’ is extremely;
useful for this purp ose. In mod £m_ hfe,_ the range op
observation and memor y whicly ma y—start—a—nety
thought-train is so vast that it is almost i ncredjbitLgasg.

142 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch.6

to^Qrget^ 5 .m^thQughL.ajidjiey^ agam_pid^up_the
^traiL whic . h led fo if . The story may-be true which tell s
\ of a man who had so br iUiajaijmJ.de a^that he went into
<his garden-to.. thflnk^Gfid fQrjtt,jfouncLojn_risiJig—fr orn
i h i s -J ? n fi £ S. . iha t he had forg ott en it. and never recalled
(ik. And if a thinker is fortunate enough to be visited by
some larger conception — a constructive theory, or a
story, or poem - which carries with it from the first an
Intimation of its complete form, he must break through
all habits and duties till the impulse to develop and
record it is exhausted.

A group of able teachers of philosophy in Columbia
University, headed by Prof. J. J. Coss, published a year
or two ago a volume of essays on Reflective Thinking,
for the guidance of their students. It is a significant
indication of the present conditions of intellectual work
in New York that the writers assume that ‘real thought’
never takes place except during the fixed ‘working’
hours. I he occasion,’ they say, ‘of reflective thought
becomes clear when the activities of a day are reviewed.
V. e rise, dress, breakfast, read headlines, go to business,
but only when the morning’s mail brings up a question
requiring a decision does real thought make its appear¬
ance. Thought comes when decisions or conclusions are
necessary, when the usual succession of acts is inter¬
rupted, and consideration has to be given to the next
step. A doctor thinks when he has to diagnose a new
case — a student thinks when he applies his knowledge
to the solution of an original problem in geometry-a
city official thinks when he considers the best method of

Ch.6

THOUGHT AND HABIT

143

making a tax levy.’ This passage helps to explain why
Professor Carrel has to escape from the Rockefeller
Institute to Brittany if he wishes to arrive at new
physiological ideas. It is true that a Columbia student
who strolled daily down Broadway in a ‘brown study’
would not live long, but no worse service can be done to
him than to encourage him to submit to his environ¬
ment, and to ignore the weak Intimations of new ideas
which now knock unavailingly at the door of his con¬
sciousness while, after a hurried breakfast, he ‘reads
headlines,’ or enters the roaring mellay of the rush-
hour trains, or watches at night a high-speed comic
opera or a flickering film.

To a modern thinker on man and society, th e pro¬
b lem of recording fringe-tho ughts is particularly im¬
portant during those hours in each week which he
spends in newspaper-reading. Newspaper-reading is
for most of us a life-long training in the bad habit of

mildly enjoying and completely forgetting an infinite
series of disconnected ideas, of which the only useful
result is the possibility that the worn path of our sub¬
conscious thought may in some future crisis make the
way to the formation of a conscious conclusion rather
more easy. 1 If we mark all the articles in one or two
daily papers which set us thinking, and at the end of a
week or month cut out and file them, we may accumu¬
late a mass of intractable material which it is a labour of
Hercules, or of a sub-editor, or at least of a man with
a highly skilled professional secretary, to use at all.

1 See above, p. 73.

H4

Ch.6

THE ART OF THOUGHT

It is, perhaps, a not wholly impossible counsel of per¬
fection that w e should train our minds to be equally
s trict in reiecting the second-rate ideas which come

during newspaper-reading , and in retaining the few
that seem really helpful; that we should so mark each
cutting as to indicate at a glance the exact point which
made it seem significant at the time of reading; that
every cutting should as soon as possible be separated
from its fellow cuttings, and take its place in a bundle
of less repellent written notes and extracts; and that we
should ruthlessly destroy all cuttings which, if glanced
at later, seem no longer significant. A man whose
literary output is not too large may find it useful once
every three or four years to run quickly through his
own already published books and occasional writings,
to see if these do not suggest some inchoate thoughts
which he may have left undeveloped at the time, but
with which he can now proceed.

T he special habits which each thinker should attempt
to acquire in dealing with his accumulated material of
notes of reading, recorded fringe-thoughts, and past
writings, will vary , of course, with the nature of his
material, the character of his work, and his own natural
powers. Sir Walter Scott would browse for an hour
oyer some of the old-no tes of his seventeenth-century
reading, or some new an ecdotes and d escriptions sent
him by Erskine or Ballantyne. and would then write
a chapter of a novel without t hat preliminary outline
which Henry Tames called a ‘scenario,. ’ A man with¬
out Scott’s superb natural gifts, who i s engaged in ex-

Ch.6

THOUGHT AND HABIT

145

ploring som e pr oblem
ag ain and ag ain to re-ti

records . If he is to in
which originally occurred independently to connect
themselves as a single and consistent argument, he may
require to make a dozen scenarios in the writing of a
single chapte r. The question as to what habits it is best
to acquirte in this respect will, again, vary with a
thinker’s age. A man of fifty or sixty will have as a
rule a larger accumulated stock of ideas than a man of
twenty-five, but he will also have a less rapid and elastic
memory. He will not be able to sit back in his chair
and sweep, without the help of notes, over the whole
plan of the book that he is writing, and over all the ideas
automatically suggested by every part of it. Charles
Dickens, for i nstance, did not be gin to keep a note-book
o f ideas and facts until he was forty-three years of a ge,

and he made increasing use of it during the next ten

y ears. 1

To some thinkers who are also teachers , the process
of helping ideas to grow into relation with each other
may be greatly eased by the habit of oral lecturing and.
seminar-teaching; if only they are fortunate enough to
find a post in which lecturing and teaching are suffic-^.
iently limited to be a means towards thought and not a
substitute for thought. The presence and emotional
stimulus of an audience, and the fact that one neces¬
sarily approaches the subject from a somewhat different

1 John Forster, Life of Dickens (edition of 1911), Vol. II, pp. 332-
47 -

;n the social sciences, will haYe)
ink and rearrange his scattered.’

duce many hundreds of ideas*'

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. 6

146

angle from that of a writer may in such cases be valuable.
But to secure this result a lecturer should be careful
'■'■'never to read from a manuscript; to watch for new and
significant ideas occurring during his lecture; to write
down an indication of those ideas immediately after, or,
if he can do it quickly and without being observed,
during the lecture, and, if possible, to discuss the whole
lecture afterwards with a body of s tudents few enough
apd keen enough for r eal-dialectic. On the other hand,
many teacher-thinkers seem to feel that the effort of
using two different methods, and of putting, in the
broad style of the platform or the ^lass-room. tho ughts ,
which they must afterwards try to express with scientific

exactness, is for them rather worse than a waste of time.

It might appear that daily journalism would be a
better means than daily teaching of increasing the
fertility of thought. Experience, however, seems to
contradict this; v ery few men who have, for any con¬
s iderable part of their lives, been writers, as distin-
guished from occasional reviewers or contributors, on a_
daily newspaper, have produced important original
work, and those few have generally been men who were
fully aware of the intellectual dangers of their profes¬
sion, and who took careful precautions, e.g. by giving
certain hours of each day to more continuous work,
against those dangers. I thought that I understood the
reason for this when I heard a small group of English
daily journalists discuss their intellectual methods. The
daily journalist gets his subject two or three hours before
his ‘copy’ must go to press. He so trains his brain to

Ch.6 THOUGHT AND HABIT 147

answer to the stimulus of the daily need, that several
of my journalist friends have told me that they find it
almost impossible to write vigorously without that
stimulus. But of necessity their thoughts are ‘first’ and
not ‘second’ or ‘third’ thoughts. A man who has to
write the last sentences of an article in the intervals of
correcting a proof of the opening sentences cannot
train himself patiently to expect t he shy feeling of
Intimation and develop it into a new thought; and he
would be a hero among daily journalists who should
reread every morning the article which he wrote the
night before, and strive to make it the starting point of
a train of thought which it will now be too late to pub¬
lish. Dean Wace, of Canterbury, was for twenty years
a leader-writer on The Times , and the Archbishop of
Canterbury, when preaching his funeral sermon, said
that tha t experience ‘t aught him to say with cogent
terseness w h at he ha d to say.’ 1 But the readers of Dean
Wace’s controversies with Huxley will regret that his
experience did not in that field of thought teach him
to say anything but what he had ‘had to say’ since child¬
hood. Weekly journalism, where a man has two or three
or even four or five days between the choice of his sub¬
ject and the completion of his article, is far less danger¬
ous to thought, and monthly and quarterly journalism
has often been one of the ways in which the most
patient thinkers have discovered or published their
results.

But I end by repeating that every thinker must
1 The Times , Jan. 14, 1924.

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch.6

148

remember always that if he is to get any advanta ge
f rom the fact that he is a living organism and not a
machine , h e must be the master and not the slave of
his habits. He should watch for the least sign that
his careful arrangements of time and method and
material are making him ‘ stuffy’ ; and if so, he should
get as soon and as completely as possible into the
physical and moral ‘open air.’ For that purpose he may
find it best to sacrifice some of the advantages of habit
i n order to strengthen the factor of stimulus : he may,
for instance, temporarily begin working at dawn in¬
stead of 9 a.m. and go for a walk at 11 a.m., in order to
work longer in the afternoon. He may cut down his
newspaper-reading to five minutes a day, or read, for a
day or two, nothing, or contemporary novels only. He
may go for a voyage, leaving his files and card-ca ta¬

lo gues at home, and try to follow up, while thinking
hard all the time, with humility and sympathy the ideas

which his neighbours in the steamer smoking-room will
confidentially expound to him... If he is a writer, he may
give a course of lectures, or if he is a lecturer, he may
spend a Sabbatical term in writing an unacademic book.
^Descartes, who lived in a time when war was, for a
gentleman, a comparatively safe occupation, got the
most fruitful stimulus of his life by going on a short
campaign. This antinomy between t he stimulus of
i habit in time and place and circumstance, and th e

stimulus of breaking habit, is constantly reflected in the
lives of those who are capable of serving mankind as

crea tive thinkers. I have already discussed (p. 88) the

Ch.6

THOUGHT AND HABIT

149

fact that, t hough without industry great intelle ctual V

work cannot be done, vet mere industry mav prevent
creation. B ut that fact constitute s the simplest of thg
problems of conduct which torment and perplex those
who believe themselves to feel the urge of genius.

There have been Shakespeares who were useless to man¬
kind because they stayed in Stratford with Anne Hatha¬
way, Shelleys because they obeyed their father, or were
faithful to Harriet Westbrook, and Mary Wollstone-
crafts who died as respected and pensioned school¬
mistresses. But there may have been many more
Wagners who were destroyed by gambling, Byrons by
sex, and Marlowes by drink, before they had created
anything, and Descartes who stayed too long in camp.

VII

EFFORT AND ENERGY

An important hindrance to further development in the
art of thought arises from a want of clearness in our
conception of the facts behind our use of such words as
‘energy,’ ‘effort,’ or ‘ease,’ in speaking either of con¬
scious or of subconscious mental activity. Creat ive
thinkers have noticed, not only that their hest sing le
ideas seemed to come to them by automatic Illumina¬
tion, but that their more continuous work was often
most successful when it was done witho ut the str ain of
effort, and even without any conscious feeling of voli¬
tion. Milton speaks of the ‘celestial patroness’ who

‘deigns

Her nightly visitation unimplored
And dictates to me slumbering; or inspires
Easy my unpremeditated verse.’

(Paradise Lost, Bk. IX, 11 . 21-4.)

But it is difficult, with our existing psychological
vocabulary, to indicate the fact that work done without
conscious effort may vary greatly in respect to the
‘energy,’ or ‘force,’ or ‘vitality,’ with which it is done.
The effortless thought-process which Milton describes
must in his case have involved intense mental energy.
His words, however, would equally describe a process
involving little or no energy; and he was probably not
himself aware of any difference between his conscious¬
ness of more energetic and of less energetic effortless

150

Ch. 7 EFFORT AND ENERGY 151

thought. There is a hint of awareness of such a differ¬
ence in a letter of Mozar t’s in which, describing his
conscious experiences during the production of one of
his great musical creations, he says, ‘ All the inv enting
and making goes on in me, as in a b eautiful strong
dream.’ 1 Mozart apparently recognized a difference in
the form taken in consciousness by a ‘strong’ and a less
strong ‘dream’; but m ost think ers, even if they may
have a theoretical knowledge that effortless thought can
be more and less energetic, seem un able to be_sure
whether at any given moment their effortless ease of
production is accompanied by a rise or by a fall of men-
tal energ y. Mr. J. Middleton Murry , who is not only
a professional critic but also a man with personal ex¬
perience of original literary creation, has written (in his
Problem of Style , 1922) some interesting sentences on
this point. When discussing ‘the kind of hallucination
from which Swinburne sometimes suffered,’ he says:
‘ Anyone who ha s tried to miie_iias„experienced mo_-
ments when , i n the flagging of his own -.creatiy.e_effort,
his writing seemed to be endowed with a sudden vitality.
Word follows word, sentence follows sentence i n_swift
succession; b ut so far from being the work of inspiration,
on the morrow it appears flabby a nd-lifeless’ (p. 22).

The whole problem is c omplicated by the well-,
known phenomena of hahi t. Mental activities which
were originally carried through with severe voluntary
effort, inevitably become on repetition less effortful and
less conscious; how, therefore, can a thinke r, _as_J\is
1 Quoted by William James, Principles, Vol. I, p. 255.

152 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch.7

work becomes more habitual, prevent t he resulting

decline in effort from being accompanied by a de cline
in energy? Wordsworth, when, after Coleridge’s return
from Germany, he began to think about his own mental
processes, made the mistake of ignoring this difficulty;
he assumed that the ease of production resulting from
habituation was the same thing as the ease of production
which accompanied, in Milton’s case and in his own
best work, the greatest energy of thought. In the cele¬
brated preface to the second edition of the Lyrical
Ballads , he says that ‘poems to which any value can be
attached, were never produced on any variety of sub¬
jects but by a man who, being possessed of more than
usual sensibility, had also thought long and deeply.
For our continued influxes of feeling are modified and
directed by our thoughts ... so by the repetition and
continuance of this act, our feelings will be connected
with important subjects, till at length, if we be origin¬
ally possessed of much organic sensibility, such habits
of mind will be produced, that by obeying blindly and
mechanically the impulses of those habits, we shall de¬
scribe objects, and utter sentiments of such a nature and
in such connection with each other, that the understand¬
ing of the being to whom we address ourselves, if he be
in a healthful state of association, must necessarily be in
some degree enlightened, his taste exalted, and his
affections ameliorated.’ 1 Wordsworth here, by using

1 Lyrical Ballads, 1800, Preface, p. xiv. Part of this passage is also
quoted by Mr. Murry, but for a purpose somewhat different from my
own.

EFFORT AND ENERGY

Ch. 7

153

the words ‘blindly and mechanically,’ describes exactly
the mental attitude which was most likely to lead to loss
of energy, and which did, in fact, help to destroy in him
the power of producing great poetry. His Ecclesiastical
Sonnets were the natural result of a ‘blind and mechani¬
cal’ following of habit in production. Mrjohn Drink-
water, o n the other han d, seems to imply that the ease
resulting from habit is necessarily accompanied by a

loss of energy. In his ‘Carver in Stone’ he speaks of

‘Figures of habit driven on the stone
By chisels governed by no heat of the brain
But drudges of hands that moved by easy rule.’ 1

The problem, however, of the relation between habit
and energy is not so simple; and I have already used
the same metaphor as Mr. Drinkwater in pointing out
(p. 134), that time-habit can be so managed as to aid
that ‘warming up’ of the mind which indicates an
increase of energy.

A more fundamental method of establishing a mental_
habit (if one can still use the term) by which mental
energy, instead of being diminished, is constantly re¬

newed, can be inferred from the contrast which Mr.
Henry Hazlitt draws, in his Thinking as a Science ,
between the accou nts given by Herbert Spencer and
John Stuart Mill of their respective intellectual
methods. Spencer describes in his Autobiography a
mental habit which was almost c ertain t o lead to a pro-

1 Georgian Poetry , 1913-15, p. 94.

THE ART OF THOUGHT

154

Ch. 7

gressivc decline of energy. When George Eliot told
him that she was surprised to see no lines on his fore¬

head, he explained, he says, that ‘My mode of thinking
did not involve that concentrated effort which is com¬

monly accompanied by wrinkling of the brojys. It has
never been my way to set before mysel f a problem and
puzzle out an ans wer. The conclusions at which I have
from time to time arrived, have not been arrived at as
solutions of questions raised; but have been arrived
at unawares — each as the ultimate outcome of a body
of thoughts which slowly grew from a germ. Some
direct; observation or some fact met with in reading,
would; dwell with me: apparently because I had a
) sense of its significance. . . . And thus, little by
little, in unobtrusive ways, without conscious intention
or appreciable effort, there would grow up a coherent
and organized theory. Habitually the process was one
of slow unforced development, often extending over
years; ... it may be that while an effort to arrive forth¬
with at some answer to a problem, acts as a distorting
factor in consciousness and causes error, a quiet con¬
templation of the problem from time to time, allows
those proclivities of thought which have probably
been caused unawares by experiences, to make them¬
selves felt, and to guide the mind to the right con¬
clusion .’ 1

Mill, on the other ha nd, uses t he te rm habit, as Aris-

1 H. Spencer, Autobiography, Vol. I, pp. 399-401. The whole of
the passage is worth studying. Part of it is quoted by H. Plazlitt (loc.
cit., pp. 84-8).

EFFORT AND ENERGY

Ch. 7

155

totle 1 does in the Ethics , t o describe a menta l attitude in
which a high degree of ene r gy is _so maintained by. re¬
peated voluntary effort as to become at least partially
a utomatic . H e speaks of ‘a mental ha bit to which I
attribute all that I have ever done, or ever shall do, in
speculation; th at of never acceptin g half-solutions of
difficulties as complete; never abandoning a puzzle, but
again and again returning to it until it was cleared up;
never allowing obscure corners of a subject to remain
unexplored, because they did not appear important;
never thinking that I perfectly understood any part of
a subject until I understood the whole .’ 2 We can de¬
tect in the two statements the chief cause which made
Mill’s thought, though done by a tired man after or
before office hours, more valuable to mankind than
Spencer’s thought, though he gave his whole time
to it.

But in the art of thought, as in other arts, the effi¬
cient stimulation of energy does not depend merely, or
even mainly, on either the intensity or the repetition of
the original effort. The thinker must also learn ho w to
make that p articular kind of effort, that pa rticu lar
‘ stroke,* which will bring the energ y of his organism
most easily and most completely to bear on his task.
‘Natural’ thinkers, like ‘natural’ cricketers, or boxers, or

\A^

1 See e.g. Aristotle’s definition ( Ethics , I, vn, 15, and II, vi, 15) of
happiness as ‘an energy of the mind in accordance with virtue’ and of
virtue as ‘an established habit of voluntary decision.’

2 J. S. Mill, Autobiography , 1873, p. 123 (see Hazlitt, loc. cit.,

P . 87).

156 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch.7

oarsmen, may learn that ‘stroke’ for themselves. Some
thinkers never learn it at all; I have listened, on the
public bodies of which I have been a member, for hours
together to slack rambling speeches delivered with tre¬
mendous effort by good and earnest men and women
who have never caught the trick of stimulating in them¬
selves the mental energy which would have given point
to their thought. Sometimes a thinker will miss the
necessary ‘stroke’ because he directs his conscious effort
to some form of activity which is not that essentially
needed by the task in hand. I remember that when
William Morris was fatiguing his great brain and wear¬

ing out his powerful body by delivering innumerable
confused Marxist speeches at street corners, Bernard

Shaw said to me, ‘Morris has come into this movement
with all his energy, but not with all his intelle ct.’ Shaw
was here using the word ‘energy’ in the sense in which
I am using the word ‘effort.’ Morris, in the arts of
designing and printing, and sometimes in his poetry,
had learnt the stroke by which the ‘energy’ (in the sense
in which I am using the word) of his intellect could be
most effectively brought to bear. In the kind of thought
which is the first duty of a social critic and inventor he
had not learnt that stroke, and had hardly recognized
that he needed to learn it.

Most thinkers, however, are neither natural artists in
thought, nor unable or unwilling to learn their art.
But, in the absence of an accepted ‘scientific art,’ they
learn by a puzzled and often unsuccessful imitation of
the thought-processes and mental attitudes of others,

EFFORT AND ENERGY

i57

Ch. 7

until a sense of the craftsman’s mastery comes to them.
And to learn by such a method the right kind of stroke
in thought is much more difficult than to learn it in
cricket or rowing or designing; s ucces s in the self¬
stimulation of mental energy requires the co-ordination
of innumerable psychological factors of whose nature
and working we are largely ignorant, and often the over¬
coming of unconscious inhibitions. And sometimes the
t hinker will be tormented by the fear, well or ill foun ded,
t hat he is contending , not against a tempo rary inhibi¬
tion, but against innate and permane nt inability. Much
of the best existing material for those who seek in this,
r espect to improve their m ental methods is the nega¬
tive evidence contained in accounts given by thinkers of
t heir own sense of failure. In the Memoir of Henry
Sidgwick, for instance, with its noble record of a life¬
long intellectual service which never quite attained its
end, there are two letters — written in 1864, within a
few days of each other, at the age of twenty-six after a
stay in Germany — which make one feel that Sidgwick
then had a glimpse both of a form of mental effort which
his splendid ability, his industry and courage, the advice
of his friends, and the psychological treatises of his
time never made clear to him, and of the degree of men¬
tal energy to which that effort might lead. ‘I believe,’
he says, in one letter, ‘I am cursed with some original
ideas, and I have a talent for rapid perception. But I
am destitute of Gibbonian gifts which I most want.
I cannot swallow and digest, combine, build. Then
people believe in me somewhat. I wish they would

158 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch.7

not.’ If he had been a physicist or a biologist, he might
a little later have learnt the secret which he sought at
Cambridge, when Clerk Maxwell returned there in
1871, or when Francis Balfour began his embryologi-
cal work in 1875. his own sphere of work, one feels
that the atmosphere of ‘thoroughness’ in the academic
Germany of 1864 might then have helped him, and
that it may have been a wise impulse which led him to
write in the other letter, with a possible return to Ger¬
many in his mind, ‘I always feel i t only requires an
effort, a stretching of the muscle s, and the tasteless
luxury, the dusty culture, the noisy and inane pol¬
emics of Cambridge and Oxford are left behind for
ever.’ 1

Sometimes the effective stimulation of mental energy
depends on the establishment of a right relation between
the thought-process and those ‘emotions’ or ‘instincts’
or ‘passions’ whose part in rational thought has been so
much discussed by modern psychologists. Mr. J. M.
Murry, for instance, after quoting a good many intro¬
spective accounts of literary creation, says (The Prob¬
lem of Style , p. 14) that ‘the lesson of the masters is
really unanimous’ and that ‘the source of style [he is
here using the word style as almost equivalent to

1 Henry Sidgwick, A Memoir, p. 118. The seeker for guidance in the
more difficult kinds of mental effort may find another negative hint in a
casual remark by Sir William Harcourt’s biographer, that Harcourt’s
mind, trained first by Cambridge scholarship and afterwards by pro¬
fessional law practice, had ‘a power of illustration rather than imagina¬
tion’ (Life, by A. G. Gardiner, Vol. I, p. 175).

Ch.7 EFFORT AND ENERGY 159

thought] is to be found in a strong and decisive original
emotion’ {ibid., p. 15). The word ‘emotion’ is, how¬
ever, here, as often elsewhere, ambiguous. It may mean
little more than the form taken in consciousness by any
kind of intense mental energy — the ‘continuous excite¬
ment,’ for instance, under which Mr. A. E. Housman
says that in the early months of 1895 he wrote the
greater part of his ‘Shropshire Lad.’ 1 If we use the
word in this sense, Mr. Murry’s statement amounts to
little more than the proposition that mental energy is
not to be acquired without mental energy. But ‘emo¬
tion,’ in its more exact sense, means the form taken in
consciousness by any one of those impulses which
apparently arise in the lower brain, and which in the
primitive psychological cycle mediate between sensa¬
tion and associative thought; the ‘passion’ to which
Milton referred when he said that poetry should be
‘sensuous and passionate,’ or the ‘love’ to which Words¬
worth referred when he wrote, ‘In a life without love
there can be no thought; for we have no thought (save
thoughts of pain) but as far as we have love and admira¬
tion,’ 2 and which Dante meant when he said, ‘I am one
who when Love inspires take note, and as he dictates
within me I express myself.’ 3 Sometimes the white heat
of such a passion will stimulate the brain into abnormal
achievements of thought in solving the problems of the
moment, as in the instances given by William James in

1 Preface to Last Poems (1922).

2 Mrs. O. Campbell, Shelley a?id the Unromantics (1924), p. 268.

3 Piirgatorio, Canto XXIV.

160 THE ART OF THOUGHT CI1.7

his essay on ‘The Energies of Men,’ and in the descrip¬
tion of war-passion which he there quotes from Colonel
Baird-Smith, who, when barely alive from fatigue and
disease and wounds at the siege of Delhi, found that
‘the excitement of my work was so great that no lesser
one seemed to have any chance against it, and I cer¬
tainly never found my intellect clearer or my nerves
stronger in my life.’ 1 More often emotion becomes an
effective factor in thought only when the original ner¬
vous excitement has died down (Wordsworth’s ‘emo¬
tion remembered in tranquillity’) or when the emotions
have been organized into what Mr. Shand calls ‘senti¬
ments.’ When the war broke out in 1914, I expected
that the emotions stimulated by it would at once create
memorable poetry or prose, and prepared to collect a
small anthology of war-philosophy and war-poetry. I
soon found, however, that the terrific emotions of a
modern war are apt to benumb rather than to stimulate
all the higher processes of the mind which are not
applied to the work of fighting. Before the fig hting
began , Mr. John Masefield wrote his lovely ‘August,
i_9£4>’ a nd when the fighting was over, Mr. Housma n
o produced an epigram on ‘A Mercenary Army’ which
was worthy of Simonides; and that was all, except a tiny
German lyric in a newspaper, which I found myself
desiring to keep.

The physiological events, indeed, which underlie our
consciousness of passion may often, even in ordinary

1 William James, Selected Papers on Philosophy (Everyman’s Library,
1917), p. 49.

EFFORT AND ENERGY

161

Ch. 7

life, prevent that harmonious energy of the whole
organism on which efficiency in thought depends. The
psychiatrists have shown us that when our upper brain
needs the passive expectance of a new thought, our
teeth may be clenched, our fingers taut, the ‘sympa¬
thetic’ nervous system may be in a condition of strain,
and our ductless glands in full activity; and then when
our upper brain calls for activity all or part of the rest
of our organism may refuse to respond. Therefore,
during the last half-century, ever since, indeed, the
psychology of the subconscious has been studied, recur¬
rent advice has been given to thinkers that they should
secure organic unity by a conscious attempt to extend
the condition of relaxation throughout their whole
organism. William James, in one of the best known of
his ‘Talks to Teachers’ (The Gospel of Relaxation ) 1 in¬
sists on the special importance of this advice for Amer¬
ica. Some Americans, he says, on returning from
Europe, observe the ‘desperate eagerness and anxiety’
in their compatriots’ faces, and say: ‘What intelligence
it shows! How different from the stolid cheeks, the
codfish eyes, the slow, inanimate behaviour we have
been seeing in the British Isles’ (p. 28). ‘But,’ says
James, ‘that eagerness, breathlessness, and anxiety are
not signs of strength: they are signs of weakness and of
bad co-ordination. The even forehead, the slab-like
cheek, the codfish eye, may be less interesting for the
moment, but they are more promising signs than in¬
tense expression is of what we may expect of their
1 William James, Ibid pp. 22-39.

L

162

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. 7

possessor in the long run’ (p. 31), and he goes on to
advocate ‘the gospel of relaxation . . . preached by
Miss Annie Payson Call in her admirable little volume
called Power through Repose ’ (p. 33). T ames’s warning
m ust, in thousands of cases, have saved teachers and
others all over the world from wearing themselves out
by the mere friction of opposing nervous tensions. But
Miss Call’s gospel of relaxation must have led many of
those who followed it faithfully into that state of mild
intellectual passivity which was attained by Herbert
Spencer at his worst moments. The thinker should
judge Tils work, not by the degree of his internal har¬
mony as he does it, but by his success in the creation of
new thought in a world the most important of whose
conditions are external to himself. No thinker, there ¬
fore, can do all his work in a stat e of organic harmony.
Between the moments of harmony there must come
times of painful strain and discord, when, as Maudsley
says, ‘the face of a person eagerly pursuing a thought is
that of one trying eagerly to see something which is
difficult to be seen, pursuing it, as it were, with his eye,’ 1
the face that one can watch in the British Museum
Library when a writer is striving to capture some elusive
Intimation, or to hold his unwilling attention to some
distasteful problem. Shelley, in those months when the
true conditions of creative thought were being revealed
to him, wr ote to Godwin o f the ‘a ltern ate tranquillity
. . . which is the attribute and accompanim ent of

1 H. Maudsley, The Physiology of Mind (1876), p. 381, quoted by
Rignano, The Psychology of Reasoning (1923), p. 81.

Ch.7 EFFORT AND ENERGY 163

powe r; an d the agony and bloody swea t of intellectual
travail.’ 1

The relation between ‘tranquillity’ and ‘agony,’ and
between all the intermediate grades of harmony and
conflict in the thinking organism, must, of course, and
should vary constantly with variations in the individual
thinker and his task. The genius will differ from the
intelligent man of industry, the dramatist from the
archaeologist, the young man from the old, the man
beginning his task from the man ending it. But
every thinker, even at his moments of most h arm¬
onious energy, must be prepared for the sud den
necessity of straining effor t, and in his moments of.
greatest effort may hope for the sudden sense of
harmony.

The young thinker , i f he requires a general formula
f or the increase of mental energy , will find the phrase
‘ Power through Actio n’ mor e helpful than ‘Power
through Repose.’ Action, in subtle ways that are the
result of millions of years of organic evolution, brings
all the factors of the organism into relation to each
other, and in that region of full consciousness which is
indicated by the word ‘self’ action, more than any other
expedient, brings unity without loss of energy. Who¬
ever has been called upon to act publicly on what have
hitherto been his private speculative opinions, can re¬
member that the various ‘selves’ of his thoughts and
words, and of the thoughts and words of other men in
relation to him, came wonderfully nearer to each other
1 E. Dowden, Life of Shelley (1886), Vol. II, pp. 171-3.

1 64 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch.7

- that, to use the language of the Autocrat of the
Breakfast Table , ‘The real John, John’s ideal John, and
Thomas’s ideal John’ were more nearly one than they
had ever been before. He seemed to drop a hundred
intellectual disharmonies as Christian in The Pilgrim's
Progress dropped his burden. J ohn Dew ey says, ‘All
people at the outset, and the majority of people probably

all their lives, attain ordering of thought through order-
ing of action.’ 1 But even when the thinker has acted on
his thoughts, and has thereby attained a new measure of
moral and intellectual unity, he should beware of de¬
ceiving himself by the belief that he can now substitute
a single formula for the whole complex art of thought.
That on which the efficiency of his work will ultim¬
ately depend may be no part of his new confident unified
self, but some vaguely disturbing Intimation, whose
significance arises from its relation to causes and effects
in the world outside his self, and which can only be
brought to the surface of consciousness by a difficult
effort of will. Bernard Shaw’s whole life has been a pro¬
test against contentment with premature emotional and
intellectual unity, and on 011c occasion, when in debate
a critic had said, ‘Mr. Shaw, you seem to talk like two
people,’ Shaw answered, ‘Why only two?’ And, on the
other hand, Mr. Shaw’s selves may be offering him
contradictory interpretations of a single universe; and
contradictory interpretations of the universe, though
they may all be helpful in providing a choice of decis¬
ions and a wider range of association, cannot all be
1 How we Think (1910), p. 41.

Ch. 7 EFFORT AND ENERGY 165

right. Verification with her lame fo ot and painful step
must follow Illumination.

Action, again, not only produces psychological
unity, with all its advantages and all its dangers, but
may also directly increase — in the course of that physio¬
logical process one of whose manifestations we call
habit — the energy which it stimulates. William James’s
great chapter on ‘Habit’ in his Principles of Psychology
can indeed be read, almost line for line and word for
word, as a direction for strengthening, not only habitu¬
ation, but also energy. ‘Seize the very first possible
opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on
any emotional prompting you may experience in the
direction of the habits you aspire to gain . . . When a
resolve or a fine glow of feeling is allowed to evaporate
without bearing practical fruit it is worse than a chance
lost; it works so as positively to hinder future resolu¬
tions and emotions from taking the normal path of dis¬
charge.’ And his advice to ‘speak genially to one’s
grandmother ... if nothing more heroic offers,’ 1 in¬
dicates a means of strengthening not only the habit of
genial speech but also the energy of our geniality.

But if we are to use action as a means of stimulating
the energy of our thought, we shall require a more de¬
tailed analysis of the term ‘action’ than that offered in
James’s chapter. ‘It is not,’ he there says, ‘in the
moment of their forming, but in the moment of their
producing motor effects, that resolves and aspirations
communicate the new “set” to the brain (ibid., p. 62).

1 Selected Papers on Philosophy (1917), pp. 62-4.

THE ART OF THOUGHT

166

Ch. 7

In its influence on the organism mere motor movement
may sometimes be almost negligible; Pro f. Lloyd Mor-
gan and others have pointed out that if we put the limbs

of a passive or resistant animal or child t hrough any
movement we do’not thereby create a habit. The move¬
ment must be voluntary, and the whole organism must
take part in it. It is not the muscular movement of
speaking genially to one’s grandmother that increases
one’s love for her; an actor may, in the run of a success¬
ful play, speak genially a thousand times to an actress
whom he detests, and may thereby increase his loathing
for her; he will only increase affection if his whoje
organism takes part - if he ‘means what he says.’ Even
completely voluntary acts will also differ, as to their
effect in increasing energy of thought and emotion,
according to our knowledge of the range of persons and
things which will be influenced by them, and our pur¬
pose in exercising that influence. Two men, for instance,
of about the same age, were once walking on an Ameri¬
can winter’s day, and recalling the political discussions
which had gone on in the groups to which as young
men they had belonged. ‘I remember,’ said one of
them, ‘that I and my friends used to discuss such ques¬
tions in order that we ourselves might know the truth
and vote wisely. You and your friends seem to have dis¬
cussed them in much the same words, but you all seem
to have felt (as a naturalist feels about his science) that
if you could discover the truth about democracy, or
socialism, or federalism, you had the responsibility of
doing so on behalf of the human race.’ Bentham sat for

Ch.7 EFFORT AND ENERGY 167

nearly seventy years scribbling speculative paragraphs
on morals and legislation, and looking like any one of
many scores of insignificant little scribbling men. But
the energy which vitalized his thought, and which grew
stronger decade by decade, would have died down, had
he not always retained his belief that the movements of
his pen and the efforts and discoveries of his brain were
acts as important to mankind as the battle-orders of a
general in the crisis of a war. The psychological effect
of an act may even be greatly changed by knowledge
only received after the act is concluded. A man may sit
at his microscope dissecting the mouth of a fly, or a
freshwater mollusc. He may note the presence of cer¬
tain foreign bodies, may sketch them, and may publish
his sketch. That sketch may afterwards become the
starting-point for a beneficent world-wide campaign
against sleeping sickness or malaria or bilharzia. And
while, at the moment of observation or the moment of
publication, the energy of the observer may have been
in no way heightened, the whole force of his thought
may be changed when a year hence he sits reading his
newspaper and suddenly realizes what he has done.

When yEschylus fought at Marathon, and Socrates
defied the Thirty Tyrants, each of them strengthened
the energy of his thought because, in Aristotle’s phrase,
he ‘knew what he was doing.’ 1 And that fact is the
answer to those who would plunge, or advise others to
plunge, into mere physical action as both a guide to

1 Ethics , Book II, Chapter IV. (See also my Great Society, Chapter

v.)

168 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch.7

truth and a relief from the effort of thought. The
student who has toiled in vain to think out a solution of
the problem of the distribution of wealth, or of the rela¬
tion of man to the universe, determines to ‘stop think¬
ing and act.’ He joins a propagandist socialist body, or
becomes a Trappist monk. He finds, for the moment,
an escape from his troubles, and begins, perhaps, a
period of ‘Incubation,’ during which new thoughts may
form themselves, and lead to a new Intimation. But
that Intimation, when it comes, may find that his mental
energy has meanwhile been lowered, and that he can
no longer develop or act on his thought. To shout
speeches, to tell beads, to dig in a monastery garden,
are ways in which some of our physiological and psycho¬
logical needs may be satisfied. They are not for the
thinker — as the acts of finishing his book, or formulat¬
ing his opinions, or even resigning his office might be -
means of carrying into effect and thereby strengthening
his mental energy.

Throughout this chapter, while discussing sugges¬
tions for the preservation or increase of mental energy,

I have kept on the plane of empirical observation. I
have not inquired what is the relation between ‘energy,’
as the writer or psychologist uses the word, and the
‘energy’ of the physicist or physiologist. But a day may
come when, as I argued in Chapter I, the physicists and
physiologists will learn enough about the nature of life
to get in touch with the psychologists, and to help them
to invent means of increasing mental through atomic
‘energy.’ At present, even if we accept the view that

Ch. 7 EFFORT AND ENERGY 169

thought is driven by a ‘horme’ which is life itself, we can
seldom relate our belief to the facts of physical energy
further than the broad statement that a man in good
health is likely to be a more effective thinker than the
same man in bad health. At the Oxford International
Psychological Congress of 1923, Dr. E. D. Adrian, the
Cambridge physiologist, said (in a paper on ‘The Con¬
ception of Nervous and Mental Energy’), ‘I am quite
ready to believe that the conception of mental energy,
properly defined, may be as necessary to psychology as
that of physical energy is to physiology’; but that ‘at
present I do not think that the physiology of nervous
conduction has advanced far enough in its results to be
of any real significance for the psychologist (except so
far as he studies the physiology of the sense organs);
speaking from a purely physiological point of view, it
seems to me that the less we say about nervous and
mental energy the better’ ( Proceedings , pp. 162 and
158). As against Dr. Adrian, Professor C. S. Myers at
the same congress could only claim ‘that no harm can
result from applying the term “energy,” even though we
are ignorant of its nature, and are unable directly to
measure it in terms of mass and velocity’ (ibid., p. 186).
There may, however, be students now living who will
succeed in relating our inexact and empirical observa¬
tions of the effects of emotion and habit and action on
the success of our thinking, to those measurable facts as
to the energy of the nerve-cell with which Dr. Adrian’s
researches deal. If that happens, the art of thought may
be helped and extended by knowledge of such things as

170 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch.7

the conditions of cell-nutrition, and the influence on
living tissues of stimulation by sunlight or glandular
secretions. We may then learn how, by means unknown
to Miss Annie Payson Call, to increase the ‘energy* of
our thought by increasing the ‘energy* of our whole
organism.

VIII

TYPES OF THOUGHT

In the last two chapters I have discussed c ertain mental
habits and expedients w hich may b e deliberately
acquired by individual thinkers fo r the purpose of in¬
creasing the fertility and energy of their th oughts. In
this chapter, I shall discuss a few of those mental habits
which are characteristic of nations, or professions, or
other groups of men.

Some of these mental habits were in their origin half¬
conscious results of the conditions under which men
earn their liveliho od. No one, for instance, consciously

i nvented the legal type of though t (with its tendency to
treat words as identical with things), or the mi litary , or
clerical, or bureaucratic, or academic type; nor need one
search for an inventor to explain why the Bradford type
of thought is different from the Exeter type, or why a
Roumanian peasant thinks differently from a Viennese
merchant. On the other hand , a typ e of thought.spme-
times follows a pattern tha t was first. .created_hy_jdie
conscious effort of a single thinke r. Anaxagoras, or
Aquinas, or Descartes, or Hegel, and was afterwards
spread by teaching and imitation. The prevalence of a
type of thought is often due to a combination of con¬
scious invention and the less-conscious influence of cir¬
cumstances. Some one invents a new type of thought,
and, either at the time or later, a new fact appears in a
national or group environment which makes the new

IV i

172 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. 8

type widely acceptable. In that way, types of thought,
like the words and word-meanings by which they are
often indicated, may be invented and neglected or super¬
seded in one country, and be afterwards enthusiastically
adopted in another country whose environment suits
them better. 1 One can see why Rousseauism, for in¬
stance, as interpreted by Jefferson, ‘caught on' in
America after the Declaration of Independence; or why
a crude ‘Darwinismus’ spread in Germany as the Ger¬
man Empire began to extend beyond Europe; or why,
in the same decade, the Hegelian dialectic fitted the
needs of troubled Oxford religious thinkers. The type
of thought painfully worked out by Locke and his
friends from 1670 to 1690 went to France in 1729 to
justify the liberal opposition to Louis XV: Bentham’s
a j ■priori deduction of social machinery from primitive
instinct suited the conditions of the South and Central
American colonies after their separation from Spain:
Herbert Spencer’s Synthetic Philosophy suited Japan
after her sudden adoption of western applied science.
Sometimes, though with much hesitation, one may
ascribe the spread of a particular type of thought to
innate racial factors — the victory, for instance, of
Mohammedanism over Christianity among the stronger
African tribes, and possibly the greater success of Bud¬
dhism in the eastern than in the western half of the
Eurasian continent.

In examining such types of thought we have con-

1 See Tract XVII of the Society for Pure English, quoted above,
p. 125.

Ch. 8

TYPES OF THOUGHT

173

stantly to remember that there never exists a body of
people all of whom are equally possessed of any type-
quality. In interpreting nineteenth-century English
political history, we may usefully speak of Conservative
or Liberal types of thqught as dominant at this or that
moment, and yet we must never forget, not only that a
Liberal or Conservative Government may be supported
by a bare majority, or even a minority of the voters, but
that every Liberal or Conservative voter or minister
differs from every other, and that no one can ever be
truthfully described as being politically a Liberal or
Conservative and nothing else. In the same way, we
may fairly speak of a national English or a French type
of political thought, and yet remember that the fact
behind our statement may be that a way of thinking
which is characteristic of sixty per cent, of active French
politicians is only equally characteristic of forty per cent,
of active English politicians. This warning is specially
needful when international friction arises from the pre¬
valence of different types of thought among different
nations *, but the international policy of a modern nation
at any given moment is for its neighbours a unity, and
Englishmen and Frenchmen have therefore to recog¬
nize and try to understand the types of thought actually
prevalent in the two countries without exaggerating
either the universality or the permanence of the type in
each case.

A type of thou gh t c haracteristic, in that sense, of
English politicians (though, owing to differences of
political, educational, and religious history, not equally

174 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch.8

characteristic of Scotland and Wales), i s often indi cated
by the English useofthe expression fuddling through /
as a term of approval. That use went out of fashion, for
obvious reasons, during the war; but, now that the
English people intensely desire a return to peace and
the ways of peace, it is reappearing. Canon Barnes (now
Bishop of Birmingham) wrote, for instance, in 1922,
while discussing certain educational proposals, that:
‘Administrative difficulties we are rapidly solving by
our national genius for “muddling through.” In more
respectful and more accurate language, we are finding

the path to success by experiment, and we remain in ¬

different as to whether a logically perfect scheme wijl
r esult .’ 1 Lord Selbo rne, in 1924, sp oke of‘ the glorious
incapacity for clear thought which is one of the dis-
tinguishing marks of our race. It is the cause of our
greatest difficulties and has been the secret of some of
our greatest successes.’ 2 Mr. Lytton Strach ev. in his
Queen Victoria (pp. 150 and 152), declared that ‘Lord
Palmerston was English through and through,’ and ex¬
plained this by saying that ‘he lived by instinct - by a
quick eye and a strong hand, a dexterous management
of every crisis as it arose, a half-unconscious sense of the
vital elements in a situation .’ And Mr. Austen Cham¬
berlain was cheered by his party in Parliament when he
said (March 24, 1925), ‘I profoundly distrust logic

1 ‘The Problem of Religious Education,’ Canon Barnes (a paper
read to the Association of University Women Teachers, Jan. 5,
1922).

2 Church Times , June 20, 1924.

Ch.8

TYPES OF THOUGHT

175

when applied to politics, and all English history justi¬
fies me.’

On the other hand, French writers who have con¬
cerned themselves with the comparison between French
and English mental habits, emphasize the ‘classic,’ or
‘logical,’ or ‘mathematical’ character of typical French
thinking. Taine, when writing as an opponent of that
type of thought, declared that the French Revolution
was the work of ‘the classic spirit’ and defined it as fol¬
lows : ‘to follow out in every inquiry, with complete con¬
fidence, and without either reserve or precaution, the
method of mathematics; to abstract, define, and isolate
certain very simple and very general ideas; and then,
without reference to experience, to compare and com¬
bine them, and from the artificial synthesis so created to
deduce by pure logic all the consequences which it in¬
volves. This is the characteristic method of the classic
spirit’ (JUAncien Regime , 1876, p. 262). And in his
Notes on England (1872), p. 306, Taine says that ‘the
interior of an English head ma y not unaptly be likened
to one of Murray’s hand-books, whichcontains many
facts b ut f ew ide as.’ 1 E. Boutmy {P sy dialogic -politique
dupeuple anglais (1901), p. 27) quotes a sentence of the
French writer Royer-Collard, ‘I despise a fact,’ and
compares it with a saying of Edmund Burke about
abstract ideas, ‘I hate the very sound of them.’ A.
Fouillee, in his Psychologiedupeuplefran^ais (1898), goes
into greater detail while describing the French type of
thought: ‘The strong point of our intelligence lies less
1 See also Rignano, The Psychology of Reasoning, p. 276.

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. 8

176

in apprehending real things than in discovering connec¬
tions between possible or necessary things. In other
words, ours is a logical and combining imagination,
which delights in that which has been called the abstract
pattern of life’ (p. 185), and, speaking of French
political thought, he says, ‘ We believe that we can
carry out principles merely by proclaiming them, and
that if we change our constitution by a stroke of the
pen we thereby transform our laws and customs’

(P- 204).

It is possible, but, I believe, wholly misleading, to

explain the difference indicated in these quotations in

terms of racial biology. Although the greater part of
England and the greater part of France contain almost
exactly the same racial admixture, writers have in¬
vented a ‘Latin race,’ which is biologically less ‘senti¬
mental’ and ‘more passionate,’ or less ‘phlegmatic’ and
more ‘restless’ than the equally imaginary ‘Anglo-
Saxon race.’ Or one can ascribe the difference wholly
to education; one can represent the typical French
politician as having received a thorough training in
logic and the use of language, and the typical English
politician as a golf-playing barbarian; or, on the other
hand, one can ascribe the difference to the training in
‘character’ of the English ‘public schools’ as compared
to the ‘intellectualism’ of French education. I myself
believe that the difference which exists, and which
(owing in part to the difficulty of observing our own
mental habits) it is so hard either to describe or to
explain, is mainly due to a difference of intellectual

Ch. 8 TYPES OF THOUGHT 177

t radition, transmitted partly by education, and partly hy
political catchwords and legal institutions, and strength¬
ened by differences in the political and in ternational
history of the two countries. I do not know of any
evidence that this particular difference of intellectual
tradition was noticed before the French Revolution.
Voltaire’s Letters on the English (1730), for instance, and
Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois (1748) imply that the
English, rather than the French, are the consistent fol¬
lowers of logic. But, in any case, the Revolution, and
the twenty years of ‘war against armed ideas’ which fol¬
lowed the Revolution, fixed and emphasized the accept¬
ance of Reason as the republican ideal in France, and
opposition to Reason, in the French sense, as the ideal
of the English governing class. It is, perhaps, unfor¬
tunate that we have never invented a single easily-
personified word for our own ideal in this respect. It
would be difficult for the leaders of the most successful
English Revolution to set up, in imitation of the French
‘Goddess of Reason,’ a temple in London to ‘Our
national Genius for Muddling Through,’ or to ‘Our
Glorious Incapacity for Clear Thought.’

This difference can, however, be stated in terms of
the analysis of the thought-process which I have been
attempting in this book. We can say that E nglish
tradition has produced a greater emphasis on the less-
conscious stage of Intimation and Illumination , and
that French tradition has produced a greater emphasis
on the more-conscious stages of Preparation and Verifi-
catiom I have already quoted Mr. Lytton Strachey’s

M

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch.8

178

statement that L ord Palmerston lived politically by ‘a
half-unconscious sense of the vital elements in a situjt
tion .’ One gets a still better illustration of what I mean
in the exchange of letters towards the end of 1885 be¬
tween Lord Spencer and Sir Henry Campbell-Banner¬
man (who, though Scotch, was in many ways a typical
Englishman) after Gladstone had begun to show him¬
self a Home Ruler on the Irish question. Lord Spencer
(Dec. 13, 1885) said that he himself was ‘uneasy at the
drift of my thoughts and inclination.’ Sir Henry Camp¬
bell-Bannerman answered: ‘I confess that I find my
opinions moving about like a quicksand. ... It is a
great comfort and relief to me to hear that you are so
much bothered and complexed. It shows that my
disease is in the air and is not peculiar to myself.’ 1 M.
Fouillee might have taken this as a typical instance of
English thinking, and might have compared this appar¬
ently passive waiting upon the drift of one’s thoughts
with the rigorous application of definite political prin¬
ciples to a new problem at which M. Clemenceau would
have aimed in the same circumstances.

Our English habit of thought leads us easily to
change our min ds when we find that we feel differently
about a situation . I have been told that, during one of
Lord Salisbury’s attempts to reach an Anglo-German
understanding, a young official from the German
Colonial Office was placed temporarily in the African
section of our Colonial Office, and that he was aston-

1 Life of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, by J. A. Spender, Vol. I,
pp. 90-1.

Ch.8 TYPES OF THOUGHT 179

ished at the ‘illogical’ character of our dealings with the
native tribes. A native chief would give us every pos¬
sible justification for sending a punitive expedition
against him, and we would not do so unless we some¬
how felt that it was at the moment worth while; and a
young French official might have made the same obser¬
vation. Both national habits involve, of course, their
own special dangers. In war, for instance, our national
ideal of ‘muddling through’ is not only apt to make our
intellectual methods slow under circumstances where
speed is essential, but also may lead, and has led British
generals to avoid the severe effort of collecting and
arranging all available knowledge and of testing all
hypotheses by the most rigorous rules of consistency.
English experience, again, shows that statesmen who
accept our ideal of intellectual and emotional expect¬
ancy, should be very careful before committing their
country to binding engagements with other countries.
They may find themselves promising something this
year because they feel inclined to do so, and next year
putting aside their promise if their feeling has changed.
The fact, for instance, that in 1917, during the stress of
the war, we promised equal treatment of Hindoos and
Whites in Africa, and that in 1923, when the stress was
over, we refused, for reasons that then seemed good, to
carry out our promise in the Crown Colony of Kenya,
may prove a very serious element in the future relations
of Great Britain and India. The typically English states¬
man is especially likely to exasperate the other parties
to a contract if he permits himself to indulge in a glow

180 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. 8

of moral self-satisfaction over a change of policy which
not only expresses his new feelings, but also clearly cor¬
responds to the economic interests of his nation. On the
other hand, the‘muddling through'type of thought, with
its allowance for sub-conscious mental changes, makss
it easy for us to adapt our policy to new facts in our en¬
vironment. We can under the new conditions either
consciously recognize in ourselves new emotional
factors, such as pity, or hope, or doubt, or, even if
these factors remain below the level of full conscious¬
ness, can allow them to influence our half-conscious
decisions.

In the working of Parliamentary government — the
system by which a Cabinet, overburdened with detailed
information, is dependent on the vague feelings and im¬
pressions of facts which produce votes in the House of
Commons, and on the still vaguer feelings and impres¬
sions of the electorate — our ‘muddling through' tradi¬
tion, with its frank motto of ‘wait and see,' has enabled
us to avoid certain dangers which have destroyed the
whole system of Parliamentary government in some
other countries. The British House of Commons, for
instance, while discussing the machinery of representa¬
tion, is able to give weight in a somewhat inarticulate
way to the psychological processes by which political
opinions are formed, as well as to the mathematical pro¬
cesses by which votes are recorded and compared. The
great French mathematician, M. Henri Poincare, to
whose vivid account of the psychological processes of
mathematical discovery I have already referred, once

Ch.8 TYPES OF THOUGHT 181

wrote a preface to a book on Proportional Representa¬
tion by G. Lachapelle (1913). Henri Poincare there
said that the electors should recognize ‘that they are
voting not for persons but for ideas. ... It will be,
under the proposed system, to the interest of the poli¬
tical parties to place on their electoral lists the names of
no candidates who do not give pledges against changing
their minds (que des candidats qui leur presentent des gar-
anties contre les palinodies). It will be to the interest of
the elected members to remain loyal to the party which
has secured their election, and whose support will be
necessary for their re-election.’ M. H. Poincare even
carried his logical consistency to the point of proposing
that it should be made illegal for any elector to vote
for candidates drawn from more than one party list. 1
There are in the British House of Commons a not in¬
considerable number of members who in this respect
have what I have called the French habit of mind,
and it will be interesting to observe whether, in the pre¬
sence of admitted defects in our existing voting arrange¬
ments and the difficulty of inventing new remedies,
they will in the end secure a majority for a scheme
of Proportional Representation based on multi-
membered constituencies, and securing, as it seems
to me, mathematical precision in the counting of
votes by ignoring the psychological conditions of wise
voting.

I n all countries political direction is larg ely in the

1 La Representation Proportionelle, by G. Lachapelle, 1913; preface
by H. Poincare, pp. v, vi, xi.

182

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. 8

hands of lawyer s, and the difference between the Eng¬
lish and French political habits of mind may be con¬
nected with the difference between the conditions which
produced English and French law. English Common
Law, with its defects and virtues, has been avowedly
built up by the decisions of judges, who in deciding
particular cases seldom asked themselves what was the
origin of the impulses which in fact played a part in
their decisions. A French lawyer is encouraged to
believe, even against his daily experience, that he is fol¬
lowing a completely logical Civil Code, in the applica¬
tion of which personal feeling and impulse can play no
part at all.

In literature, the habit of energetic intellectual oppor¬
tunism, though it has led to much confused and ineffec¬
tive work, h elped us, even before we adopted it as a
political ideal, to produce Shakespeare and Fielding,
just as the same habit helped the French to produce

Montaigne and Rabelais before they adopted the
‘classic spirit’ as their literary ideal. And we have done
rather more than our share of the world’s work in
those scientific discoveries which require a readiness
to depart from established dogma and established
forms of proof. Darwin, whose methods Huxley
once compared with those of ‘a miraculous dog,’ and
Harvey, and Faraday, were in this respect typical
Englishmen.

As I write, the divergence between the French and
English types of political thought is increased by the
European situation. The French secured our signature

Ch.8

TYPES OF THOUGHT 183

to the Treaty of Versailles, and are made anxious by
signs that we are tending towards a ‘palinodie’ on some
of the clauses in that Treaty. As long as M. Raymond
Poincare (who seemed to us as typical a Frenchman as
Palmerston was a typical Englishman) was in power, he
gave us a series of Sunday sermons on the duty of con¬
sistency and sincerity, combined with the perfectly logi¬
cal argument of building hangars for an enormous air-
fleet as near as possible to London. The E nglis h find it
less easy to formulate, even to themselves, their owu
less conscious and less logical position as regards the

Treaty of Versaille s. We want to keep our promises ,

but feel vaguely that the Treaty was bas ed up on a fals_e
view of the tacts and was largely inspired by emotions of
which we are now ashame d. Those French statesmen
who argue that all discussion must start from the French
interpretation of the letter of the Treaty, seem to us to
be deliberately inhibiting in themselves the ‘still small
voice’ which might prove to be the ‘Intimation’ of new
doubts or new humanitarian motives; an d we try to ex¬
press our meaning bv saving th at the French have car¬
ried over the Var mind* into peac e. We are afraid that
if we treat, as M. R. Poincard did, any doubt as to the
wisdom of a single phrase in the Treaty, or any pity for
the future of any European people outside the circle of
France and her present allies, not as a psychological
factor in a problem of human conduct, but as a blunder
introduced into a legal or mathematical proof, we shall
crystallize the passions of November 1918 into the un¬
changing premises of a series of ‘practical syllogisms,

184 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. 8

which can only end in the destruction of European civi¬
lization. Meanwhile the years run on, and the simple
logic of the Treaty of Versailles is being reinforced
by the equally simple logic of the French Realpolitiken
who control the Comite des Forges , of the ecclesiastics
who calculate the number of square miles of ex-Russian
or ex-German territory which can be kept by force
under the control of the Catholic Church, and of the
peasant holders of French Rente. Even in September
19 2 5 , w hen France and England made their great
attempt, at the Assembly of the League of Nations, to
arrive at an understanding which should lead to per¬
manent European peace, M. Painlevd and Mr. Cham¬
berlain found it necessary to explain to the whole world
that their disagreements in the past had been caused by
this difference of national mental habits, M. Painleve
said (Official Report of the Proceedings, Sept. 7, 1925):
‘It is to these differences of mental outlook that the re¬
sistance to the Protocol [of 1924] is mainly due. The
Protocol’s universality, the severe and unbending logic
of its obligations, were framed to please the Latin men¬
tality, which delights in starting from abstract principles
and passing from generalities to details. The Ang ln-
Saxon mentality, on the other hand, prefers to pro ceed
from individual concrete cases to generalization s.’ Mr.
Chamberlain replied {ibid.. Sept. 10, 1925) by describ¬
ing the ‘Anglo-Saxon mind.’ . . . ‘We are prone to
eschew the general, we are fearful of these logical con¬
clusions pushed to the extreme, because, in fact, human
nature being what it is. logic plavs hi if a small part

Ch. 8

TYPES OF THOUGHT

185

in our everyday life. We are actuated by tradition,_
by affection, by prejudice, by moments of emotion...
and sentiment. In the face of any great problem we
are seldom really guided by the stern logic of the
philosopher or the historian who, removed from all the
turmoil of daily life, works in the studious calm of his
surroundings/

It is, of course, true that, for the moment, t his sharp
opposition betwe en the ‘illogical* position of the t ypical
English po litician, with its tendency towards a lazy
neglect of the logical consequences of his own past acts
and words, and the ‘logic’ of the typical French politi-
cian^which seems to require him to suppress all but the
simplest and most selfish of his own motives, is in large
part due to the difference in the military and economic
position of the two nations. But the contrast is also, I
believe, due, in part, to a mere clumsy accident of tradi¬
tion; and I find myself hoping that some day an art of
thought may prevail — perhaps after the horrors of a
neWThirty Years’War —in which the psychological
truths implied in both types of thinking may be recog¬
nized and combined, and the errors of both may in some
measure b e avoided. If the psychologists ever create
such an art, it may be that, a century hence, in gratitude
for escape from some world disaster which had seemed
to be ‘logically’ inevitable, a statue will be set up in New
York or Paris or Pekin, not to the Goddess of Reason,
but to ‘Psyche,’ the goddess who presides over the wise
direction of the whole thinking organism. And then,
even those ‘philosophers and historians,’ whose pro-

186

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch.8

fessional mental habits Mr. Chamberlain described
with no appearance of irony, may cease, in the ‘studious
calm’ of their libraries, to ignore most of the conditions
of their problem.

Sometimes I hope th at an art of thought which
makes full use of every factor in the human organism
may first be developed in America. When I try to
imagine my ideal of a twentieth-century intellectual
worker I find myself remembering certain Americans
I have known, of whom, omitting those who are still
alive, I will first name the late Professor William James.
These men attained a high simplicity of mind, an acces¬
sibility to the feelings of kindness and humour, an
amused humility in watching their own mental pro¬
cesses, an absence of the rigidity either of class or pro¬
fession or nation, which may some day indicate to man¬
kind many of the most important means for guiding
human life by human thought. Would any man of
learning who was not a modern American have been
likely to write, as Tames wrote after openin g (in 1885)
the first psychological laboratory at Harvard, ‘I try to
spend two hours a day in a laboratory for psychophysics
which I started last year, but of which I fear the fruits
will be slow in ripening, as my experimental a ptitude is
but small. But I am convinced that one must guard in
some such way against the growing tendency to sub¬
jectivism in one’s thinking as life goes on.’ 1

I n one of the letters, again, of W. H. Page , there is

1 Letters of William fames, Vol. I, p. 249, to Carl Stumpf, Jan. 1,
1886.

Ch.8 TYPES OF THOUGHT 187

a passage which certainly would not have been written
by Lord Curzon, or Kameneff, or Mussolini, or Ray¬
mond Poincare. ‘One day I said to Anderson . . . Of
course nobody is infallible, least of all we. Is it possible
we are mistaken? . . . M ay there not be some im por-
tant element in the problem that we do not see? Sum-
mon and nurse ev ery doubt that you can possibly mus¬
ter up of the correctness of our view, put yourself on
the defensive, recall every mood you may have had of
the slightest hesitation, and tell me to-morrow of every
possible weak place there may be in our judgment and
conclusions.’ 1 No intellectua l method is infallible, and
Mr. Page’s own final conclusions may have been right
or wrong. But here_alieast one has a type of thought
more hopeful, I believe, than either the mere passive
waiting on psychological events which often character¬
izes the English habit of ‘muddling through,’ or the
mechanical logic of M. R. Poincare.

_ It would not, however, be easy to argue either that
William James’s and W. H. Page’s type of thought
represents the intellectual habit of a sufficient number
of Americans to be called the American national type,
or that a clearly recognizable and generally accepted
national intellectual type is to be found in America.
Ameri ca is the oldest of the great e xisting democracies,
and, though American journalists often complain of the
political inertia of their fellow-citizens, a larger propor¬
tion of the American population than perhaps of any
other civilized nation are able to influence the political,
1 Life and Letters of W. H. Page (1922), Vol. I, p. 386.

188

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. 8

social and religious decisions of their communities.
The many millions of men and women whose thought
helps to create American opinion are the descendants
of emigrants from every part of Europe. Each stock
brought its own habits and ideals, and those habits and
ideals have not yet been fused even in the enormous
melting-pot of American written and spoken discus¬
sion. The mental outlook of Jefferson’s Declaration of
Independence seems to a foreign observer of America
mainly to survive in much public oratory, and in the
widespread impatience of legal coercion which some¬
times clashes oddly with Andrew Jackson’s doctrine
of the unlimited coercive right of a voting majority.
American politics, again, are largely influenced by the
vigour and gusto with which the Roman Catholic Irish-
Americans make use of the machinery of democracy,
but the Catholic tradition seems to have contributed
less in America than elsewhere to any general stream of

national thought. 1 Perhaps the type of thought which
could, at present, make the strongest claim to be domi¬

nant in the United States is that which Americans call
t jie ‘pioneer mind.’ This type represe nts a combina¬
tion between the Evangelical Protestant tradition,
which sees life on this world as infinitely unimportant

when compared with the rewards and punishments of

1 Curiously few widely read novelists, poets, dramatists or historians
in America seem either to be Roman Catholics or to have been influ¬
enced by Roman Catholic thought. Of philosophers who are read out¬
side the Catholic fence I can only think of Mr. Santayana as showing
(though not himself a Catholic) the influence of the Catholic tradition.

Ch.8

TYPES OF THOUGHT

189

another world, and the intellectual habits arising from
the facts of daily life among the pioneer farmers, who on
the westward-moving frontier tamed the forests and
prairies by a toil that would have been unendurable
unless their minds had been set on distant results
rather than present enjoyment.

Amon g t he d escriptions of the pioneer mind that I
have met with the best is that given by Dr. Frank Crane
(whose short daily editorials are said to be read by five"\
million Americans) in the American magazine Current
Opinion for June, 1922. It is called, with a reference , .
to Mr. Sinclair Lewis’s novel, The Little Church on Main
Street. It is, in form, a hymn of triumph on the adop¬
tion of the Prohibition Amendment to the Constitution,
but it contains a description of the forces that carried
the Amendment which raises wider issues. Dr. Crane
points out that ‘the Press, Society, the Intellectuals, the 0
Church, the Politicians, including the political parties
and the Labour organizations . . . ignored or ridiculed’
the prohibition movement. What carried that move¬
ment to success was Main Street and its little church.
‘The United States may not have a homogeneous popu¬
lation, but it has the most homogeneous spirit of any
nation in the world.’ - ‘The people of the United States
are essentially pioneers, and the children of pioneers.
They have the conscience of pioneers.’ — ‘Here is the
grim remnant of Puritanism, the deposit from the evan¬
gelical wave of the eighteenth century. Here is that
deep feeling that man is first of all a moral creature,
with a context in eternity, and that every question is

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. 8

i go

primarily a moral question . . . that a human being is
first of all an immortal soul, and that nothing shall be
allowed to persist which imperils that soul.’ — ‘The
United States is bourgeois to the backbone . . . and
what makes the United States bourgeois is that its
people are almost entirely engaged in business. That
is to say, they are all occupied in trying to accomplish
something. The keyword to America is Achievement,
the keyword to Europe is Enjoyment. The American
conceives of life in terms of doing some task . . . the
European conceives himself as born to enjoy life, and
he only works enough to enable himself to have the
means for this enjoyment. That is why the United
States is enormously efficient.’

No pioneer-minded American is, of course, exactly
like any other pioneer-minded American, and no
American exists whose habits of thought are wholly and
exclusively of the pioneer type; but the test of succes¬
sive elections has shown how powerful that type still is.
To a foreign observer, howeve r, th e pioneer, type seems,
likely to lose much of its power in the near future. Mr.
Bryan saw, for instance, that everything which weakens
the doctrine of the infallibility of the Bible weakens the
pioneer type, of which he was the most conspicuous
example, and he therefore devoted the last years of his
life to the Fundamentalist agitation. But every intelli¬
gent boy or girl who reads the first chapters of Wells’s
Outline of History , or a few extracts from a translation
of the Babylonian text of the Deluge story in the Gil-
gamish Epic, or sees a photograph of the Neanderthal

Ch. 8

TYPES OF THOUGHT

191

and Piltdown skulls, is in danger of being lost to the
Fundamentalist cause; and with F undam entalism may
go the old clear conviction of the utter insignificance of
this life when compared with the life after death. Every
change, again, in the direction of further industrializa¬
tion either in American town life or American agricul¬
ture tends to weaken the pioneer type of thought. The
man who sees daily before him his own newly reclaimed
farm, which his sons and grandsons will inherit, may
be content that in his own life he ‘never is, but always
to be blest.’ The trade-unionist miner, or factory hand,
or engine-driver, or the clerk or schoolmaster serving
at a fixed salary some huge public or private corpora¬
tion, is certain, sooner or later, to ask for a measure of
blessedness here and now .

To me it also seems likely that the dissolution of the
pioneer type of thought in the United States may be
greatly quickened by the spre ad of knowledge as to
human psychology. There are at this moment some
thousands of professors and instructors of psychology
in the American universities and colleges. Almost
every one of the half-million school teachers in the
United States has received lectures on psychology, and
soon almost every entrant to schools and colleges will
have been submitted to psychological tests. There
must also be a thousand or two of those practising Freu¬
dian psycho-analysts, who in America, as elsewhere,
are exposed to the combined intellectual dangers of a
rigid sect and of a lucrative profession. American news¬
papers and magazines use, therefore, technical psycho-

192 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. 8

logical terms such as ‘reaction,’ ‘complex,’ ‘sublima¬
tion,’ ‘intelligence quotient,’ etc., with a confidence,
which would not be felt in Europe, that the ordinary
reader will understand them.

All this knowledge of psychology has, it is true, had
little effect at present upon general American habits of
thought, except in reviving the barren metaphysical
controversy of free-will and determinism. But know¬
ledge is a very active yeast when once it has started to
spread in dough of the right temperature; and at any
moment the psychological ferment may begin to act in
America. One indication of the way in which this may
happen is the success of Mr. Sinclair Lewis’s later novel
Babbitt. Babbitt is a man of natural mental and aesthetic
sensitiveness, who has started as a real-estate agent in
a great city with the uncriticized intellectual traditions
of the pioneer. He accepts as the purpose of his life
‘achievement’ in Dr. Crane’s sense, which means to him
the making of as much money as possible for other
people to spend; though the social good resulting from
his achievement in taking away business from other
‘realtors’ is not so clear as that which resulted from his
grandfather’s achievement in breaking up his acres of
prairie. But Babbitt, like his pioneer ancestors, is tor¬
mented by vague impulses tending towards something
other than ‘achievement .’ There are occasional stir¬
rings in him towards what Dr. Crane calls ‘enjoyment.’
One danger of the pioneer tradition has always been

that it looks on all impulses towards ‘enjoyments’ which

a re not ‘achievements’ as being equally ‘temptation s’;

Ch.8

TYPES OF THOUGHT 193

a man is ‘tempted’ alike to get drunk, or go after light
women, or play poker, or to take a walk which will not
earn money, or go to a theatre, or read a novel, or sit
day-dreaming by a lake-side. Flesh is weak; one sur¬
renders from time to time to temptation, and because
all surrenders are sinful it was the cruder and more
urgent temptations which on the western frontier two
generations ago were most likely to win. In a modern
commercial city the more subtle forms of enjoyment are
apt to seem even more distant and unreal, and Babbitt’s
vague impulses push him, unwilling and unhappy and
bewildered, to drink and women and repentance.

And since action and thought are part of the same
primitive psychological cycle, Babbitt’s impulses also
push him towards opinions which are inconsistent with
full devotion to the pioneer ideal of ‘achievement.’ He
feels uncomfortable stirrings after talking to the friend
who has weakened in his devotion to pecuniary success
and who has followed the strange gods of liberalism and
intellectual enjoyment. But Babbitt’s discomfort soon
passes away, and we leave him still loyal to the pioneer
mind and only occasionally envious of his son who has
finally abandoned it. Babbitt in the novel is helpless
because he does not know what is happening to him.
But a Babbitt who has read Babbitt , and has there recog¬
nized his own type, may be affected as powerfully as
a friend of mine was when he recognized himself as
Broadbent in Mr. Shaw’s John Bull's Other Island , and
went straight out of the theatre to write a letter
resigning his parliamentary candidature. He may

N

Ch.8

194 THE ART OF THOUGHT

learn to distinguish between his longing for poetry
or for some type of thought more penetrating than
his party slogan, and his longing for ‘hooch’ or
for the widow in the ‘Cavendish Apartments.’ He
may learn how to wait expectantly till his vague
‘Intimations’ develop into clear thought and clear
decisions.

The spread of psychological knowledge may even
create, here and there, exceptions to the naive way in
which the pioneer mind when transplanted to the city
thinks and feels about competitive games. Games in
America are apt to be, in Dr. Crane’s terms, matters of
‘achievement’ and not of ‘enjoyment,’ and American
‘tremendous efficiency’ is fast imposing that habit of
mind on the rest of the world. I went a few years ago
to a great ‘sports shop’ in London under orders to buy
a board on which ping-pong could be played. I asked
the shop-assistant what was the standard size, and was
told, ‘I am sorry to say, sir, that there is now no stan¬
dard size. Ping-pong has ceased to be a game, and has
become a pastime.’ Some boy Babbitt, ten years hence,
in Cincinnati may sit waiting until the ‘still small voice’
that whispers the question why football or even base¬
ball may not sometimes be a pastime makes its mean¬
ing clear, and his doubts may penetrate across the
Atlantic to the football districts of Lancashire and
Yorkshire.

But the most important effect of the spread of psvch-
ology in America may ultimately be found in its influ¬
ence on the accepted standard of intellectual energy. At

Ch.8

TYPES OF THOUGHT 195

present the causes seem largely accidental which bring
about in this or that American art or science the highest
degree of creative energy. When first, for instance, I
visited America in 1896, contemporary American
architecture seemed to show a singular slackness in
artistic creation. It was, in Mr. Drinkwater’s phrase,
the work of ‘chisels governed by no heat of the brain’ ; x
and tended to result in t he st yle which builders call
‘ Carpenter’s Goth ic.’ S ince 1806, at successive visits,
I have seen American architecture become t he supreme

c reative world-force in the art of building . One is told

that the change started when Mr. Charles Me Kim went
to Paris about 1870 to study. But the essential secret
which he and other young architects learnt in Pads was
not, apparently, how to draw certain forms, but ho w to
evoke in themselves certain intense activities of the
i magination . Henry James, in his admirable life of
William Wetmore Story, has described the mental
habits of the American painters and sculptors forty or
fifty years earlier than my first visit to the States, the
men whose works are now being edged out of the
Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art in New York, and
the poets who are now dropping into the less con¬
spicuous parts of the school anthologies. They went to
Rome, bought velvet jackets, worked endless hours,
were good friends and good men. But somehow they
never learnt how to make that elusive effort of the
whole being by which the energy necessary for great
art may be produced.

1 See above, p. 153.

196 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch.8

Sometimes, by a divine accident, an American
t hinker has learnt the ‘stroke* which enab les him to
bring his whole force upon some form of creative work,
not from watching other creators in Paris or elsewhere,
but by himself and for himself. Some American
psychologist ought to make a careful study of the
psychological process which turned the Walter Whit¬
man of 1846, the writer of intolerable edifying verse
and more intolerable edifying novels, into the Walt
Whitman who wrote ‘When lilacs last in the door-
yard bloomed.’ Walt Whitman would perhaps have
said that he ‘let himself go free.’ But what was that
‘self,’ and how was it that what seemed in memory like
a relaxation of tension was really an ‘energy of the
soul,’ an activity of the whole being whose intensity
would have been unimaginable to the Whitman of
1846?

Mr. Van Wyck Brooks has written, in his Ordeal of
Mark Twain , an extraordinarily illuminating study of the
mental history of a man whose inborn creative genius
was even greater than that of Walt Whitman. Mar k
Twain, once or twice in his life, owing to some accident

of subject or matter or memory, ‘let himself go,’ and

wrote Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn , or Life on the
Mississippi. The rest of his work consists either of fun
which will be remembered only as fun, or of serious
writing (such as his What is Man?) which is already for¬
gotten. While doing that work Mark T wain, like
Babbitt in his real-estate office, had moments and even
ye ars of vagu ely agonizing discontent; but he never

Ch. 8

TYPES OF THOUGHT

197

attained the great artist’s control over his purpose and
his powers, because he never had a reliable working
knowledge of the mental ‘stroke’ necessary for the
initiation of that control. Mr. Brooks gives many rea¬
sons for this; Mark Twain’s acceptance, for instance,
of false social and economic standards in his personal
life, and the intellectual and social timidity of his
Boston patrons. To me one of the main causes of so
great a loss to mankind is the fact that Mark Twain not
only never permanently understood the kind of energy
which great art requires, but also bedevilled his mind
by a crudely determinist metaphysic, which, because it
forced him to deny that Free Will in the old theological
sense existed, forced him also to believe that no artist
could or ought consciously to bring his will to beari
upon the methods or purposes of his work. ‘The in¬
fluences,’ he says, ‘create [man’s] preferences, his
aversions, his politics, his tastes, his morals, his religion.
He creates none of these things for himself.' His
mental machine goes ‘racing from subject to subject - a
drifting panorama of ever-changing, ever-dissolving
views, manufactured by my mind without any help
from me.’ ‘Man origina tes nothing, not even .a thought.

. . . Shakespeare could not create. He was a machine,
and machines do not create .’ 1

Meanwhile, I have noticed, in my successive visits to
America since 1896, how, with small help from the
psychologists, the secret of creative energy has spread to
painting and sculpture, to dramatic production, to the
1 What is Man P quoted by Brooks, pp. 263 and 259.

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch.8

<§>

198

writing of history, and to certain of the natural sciences;
and many other new accessions of creative energy must
have occurred of which I am ignorant. But the coming
of the great period of intellectual and artistic produc¬
tion in America for which I hope, still seems to me to
require, not only a wider and more accurate under¬
standing of the nature of intellectual energy than is
at present common in America, but also an increase
of American sympathy with intellectual effort in its.
severest and most di sinterested forms. From time_to
time, in the history of mankind, individual creative
artists and thinkers have carried through their life-work
in an atmosphere of almost universal contempt. But

great periods of creation have generally been accom-
pani ed by a considerable measure of understanding and
sympathy for the creator’ s work among those who will
benefit from it; and it has been one of the main hind¬
rances to human progress that the pioneer type of mind
hates and despises and yet fears the creative type.

Aristophanes, in The Clouds , interprets for us the feel¬
ings with which the free-born farmers who crowded
into the theatre of Dionysus from the valleys near,
Athens thought of Socrates. Everything about Soc¬
rates, his detachment from their interests and preju¬
dices, his indifference to the solid satisfactions of good
clothes and proper food and regular hours, the per¬
petual suspicion that he was laughing at them, all went
to strengthen their fear that the freedom and intensity
of his thought might destroy the whole structure of
society and the state. Exactly the same feelings may

Ch.8

TYPES OF THOUGHT

199

now, I am told, be found among the Australian fol¬
lowers of Mr. William Hughes, the South African
followers of General Hertzog, and those peasants of
Central Europe whose political tendencies have been
called th e ‘Green Inter national,’ and whose type Mr.
Belloc desires to establish as the governing force of the
world.

In America the pioneer, whether he is a farmer from
Nebraska or Indiana or Tennessee, or a simple-minded
devotee of finance in Wall Street, or the New York
Union Club, or the Chicago Wheat Pit, or the
Rotarian brotherhood, reveals his type by_ employing
the word ‘highbrow’ as a term of contempt. Plato and
Dante, Spinoza and Descartes, Locke and Darwin and
Bentham, would if they were now living Americans all.
be ‘highbrows’ to the pioneer mind. My American
friends assure me that it will be neither a short nor an
easy task to change this attitude. Change, when it
comes, will be the slow result of many causes. Al¬
ready, if a man makes much money (or enables others to
make much money) by his ideas, he may be as absent-
minded and ironical as he likes, and not even Senator
Lusk at Albany will call him a ‘highbrow.’ If, again,
the fame of an American creator is sufficiently world¬
wide to reach the American newspapers from abroad,
he is not likely to be called a highbrow. If Einstein
had been born an American, and had succeeded in find¬
ing opportunities both of doing his work and of making
it known, no American would now call him a high¬
brow. When the great American music composers of

200

THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. 8

the future are acclaimed in the opera-houses of Berlin
and Milan, no one in Nebraska will call them high¬
brows. No one even now, apart from the fact that he has
made money from his plays, calls Mr. Eugene O’Neill
a highbrow.

The one justification of the contempt of the Am er-
ican pioneer type for the highbrow, is the existence of
fraudulent or self-deceiving imitators of the creative
type. My American friends tell me that in America/
with its colossal system of book-education, there are
more young men and women than elsewhere who are
attracted by the idea of intellectual creation, without
either possessing the necessary natural powers, or
acquiring the secret of stimulating and maintaining the
necessary intensity of energy. Even in Ancient Greece
there were, as the proverb said, many who carried the
thyrsus and few who were inspired by the god. A
recognition that an art of thought exists with standards
of its own may diminish this proportion in America,
both by helping the young genius to discover the kind
of effort he is called on to make, and by helping his
neighbours to distinguish between the real artist and the
false. Prog ress in Amer ican intellectual creation may
also be quickened by an extension of the conception of
morality so as to include not only family, sexual,
dietary, and business conduct, but also the conduct of
the intellect. Dr. Crane tells us that to the pioneer
mind ‘every question is primarily a moral question.’
Anyone who has been in the habit of reading American
newspapers and hearing American speeches, both be-

Ch. 8

TYPES OF THOUGHT

201

fore and during and after the war, will have noticed
that the habit of thinking of every problem as primarily
one of choice between right and wrong prevails in
America much more largely than in any other country
except perhaps China. At present the idea of morality
is associated in America with the Christian religious
tradition, and Mr. Bryan in his Fundamentalist preach¬
ing seemed to me to be using the prestige of that
tradition to inculcate every method of thinking which
is most likely to prevent human beings from discover¬
ing truth or creating beauty. Sometimes the conscious
idea, or the half-conscious ‘censorship,’ of morality aims
in America at the purely negative virtue of so prevent¬
ing oneself from thinking freely, as to maintain certain
social conventions. Eighteen years ago William James
complained that ‘We all know persons who are models
of excellence, but who belong to the extreme philistine
type of mind. So deadly is their intellectual respect¬
ability that we can’t converse about certain subjects at
all, can’t let our minds play over them, can’t even men¬
tion them in their presence. I have numbered amongst
my dearest friends persons thus inhibited intellectually,
with whom I would gladly have been able to talk freely
about certain interests of mine, certain authors, say, as
Bernard Shaw, Chesterton, Edward Carpenter, H. G.
Wells, but it wouldn’t do, it made them too uncom¬
fortable, they wouldn’t play. I had to be silent. An
intellect thus tied down by literality and decorum makes
on one the same sort of an impression that an able-
bodied man would who should habituate himself to do

202

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch.8

his work with only one of his fingers, locking up the
rest of his organism and leaving it unused.' 1 Fifty
years hence words with the connotation of moral
judgment, ‘integrity,’ ‘open-mindedness,’ ‘courage,’
‘patience,’ ‘thoroughness,’ ‘humility,’ and the like, may
have come to be widely used in America of those
methods which the leaders of American thought shall
have shown to be most efficient in the employment
of the mind. Already there is a hint of moral judg¬
ment in Mr. W. H. Page’s statement, during his
difficult relations as ambassador with Mr. Bryan as
Secretary of State, that ‘a certain orderliness of mind
and conduct seems essential for safety in this short
life.’ 2

Perhaps, however, the maia.ho.pe for., the future of
American creative thought lies in an extension of the
American sense of nee d. We do not despise the intel¬
lectual creator who gives us something that we ourselves
really desire; and to an increasing extent the desires o f
the great average population of America may turn
towards values that cannot be expressed in terms of
money. No one now makes money by looking at the
glorious marble buildings in Washington, or the hall of
the Union Railway Station in New York, or the painted
corridors of the Boston Free Library, or the pictures
and statues and biological collections that attract scores
of thousands of eager visitors to the Metropolitan
Museums of Fine Art and Science. And fifty years

1 W. James, Selected Papers on Philosophy (Everyman Series), p. 57.

2 Life , Vol. II, p. 10.

Ch. 8

TYPES OF THOUGHT

203

hence the great-grandsons of the American pioneers
may feel not only moral sympathy but spontaneous
gratitude for that kind of effort by which alone the weak
and imperfect human brain can add to it s scan ty store
of knowledge and beauty.

IX

DISSOCIATION OF
CONSCIOUSNESS

I n the history of the art of thought, an important part
has been played by the invention of a number of

psychological expedients, differing among themselves,
but having this in common, that t hey so modify the
normal co-ordination of the factors of the human
organism, as to ‘separate off,’ or ‘dissociate,’ all or pa#
of our normal consciousness.

The simplest of these expedients has been known_at

least since the early Stone Ages, and consists of the more

or less complete dissociation of consciousness by
hypnotism or self-hypnotism. Innumerable methods
have been invented for producing this result, the
monotonous sound of the ‘bull-roarer’; the monotonous
movements of the dance; the prolonged maintenance
of a difficult bodily attitude; the prolonged direction
of the eyesight towards one object, such as a crystal
ball or Boehme’s polished pewter dish; holding the
breath; listening to the rustling of leaves in a tree; the
repetition of monotonous phrases; the use of the
rosary, etc., etc. The efficacy of these methods is often
increased by the action of drugs, by abstention from
food or sleep, and by certain kinds of music. FoTgood
or for evil, the combined physi ological discoveries of
self-hypnotism and of the use of alcohol and ot her nar¬
cotics, stand, with the inventions of fire-making and of

204

DISSOCIATION

Ch. 9

205

the artificial cultivation of food-plants, among the most
important events in human pre-history. In the develop¬
ment of religion, peculiar importance attaches to the
fact that if in the hypnotic or quasi-hypnotic state cer¬
tain beliefs are ‘suggested’ to the devotee, those beliefs
will probably be retained with singular tenacity after
the state is past.

T he literature of mys ticism, whether Hindu, Sufist, ,; T
Neoplatonist, Christian, or Theosophist, contains hun¬
dreds of descriptions of the forms taken in consciousness
by the various degrees of the hypnotic state . They all
emphasize the fact that hypnotism, at that stage where it
produces the exalted consciousness which precedes un¬
consciousness, is, like the effects of morphia and alcohol
at the same stage, extraordinarily pleasant. The descrip¬
tions are also agreed in noting that this pleasantness is
often associated with an intense conviction that the
hypnotized subject is on what some of them call ‘a
higher plane of being.’ This conviction may_perhaps
be in part suggested by the peculiar feeling of ‘levita¬
tion’ which often results from a slight dislocation of the
nervous system, and which produces in dreams the
familiar conviction that we are floating in the air or
falling through it. If we take St. Paul’s words ‘caught
up into the third heaven . . . whether in the body or
apart from the body’ (2 Corinthians xii. 2), as an
account of a psychological experience, they indicate
very exactly this feeling of levitation.

There is. of course, no necessary presumption that ^
the production of the hypnotic state cannot, because

206 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. 9

it is an interference with nature, be a helpful factor in
the art of though t. The use of mathematical symbols,
or the conscious observation of such normally less-con¬
scious states as Intimation, are also interferences with
nature, and yet are helpful in thought; at any moment,
indeed, some invention may be made in the applica¬
tion of hypnotic methods which may constitute an
invaluable addition to the process of creative thought.
But at present, all we can ask is whether hypnotism,
judged by its ascertained results, has in fact shown
itself to be helpful or not. In attempting to answer
that question one has first to distinguish between the
effects of hypnotism or similar expedients upon the
functions of the rest of the organism, and its effects
upon the intellectual processes of the upper brain.
There is a very large body of evidence indicating that.
when the Sy mpathetic ’ nervous syst em is removed
from conscious cerebral control, and is directly stimu¬
lated by ‘suggestion,’ or by what MM. Coue and
Baudouin call ‘auto-suggestion,’ a great increase in the
energy of that system may take place. This increased
energy may be made useful in medical treatment ;

tics and other apparently incurable acquired reactions

can be inhibited ; warts (as has been known by ‘white
witches’ for thousands of years) can be cured; parturi¬
tion can be brought on; ‘stigmata’ can be produced; and
perhaps tuberculosis and certain other germ-diseases
can, in their early stages, be checked . 1 T here is also
evid ence that hyp notism or ‘au to-su ggestion’ may tem-

1 See Baudouin, Suggestion a?id Auto-suggestion (pp. 22, 23).

DISSOCIATION

207

Ch. 9

porarily increase muscular strength, may temporarily
improve such simple mental processes as recollection or
arithmetical reckoning, and may initiate important
improvements in our less-conscious nervous habits.

And, before estimating the effects of hypnotism upon
the delicate and complex processes of creative thought,
one must further distinguish between the more pro_r
found and the slighter degrees of hypnotic dissociation.
Completely hypnotized persons have written poems
and philosophical treatises and novels, and have made
drawings and pictures; and poems have been composed
in the analogous condition of natural sleep. But the
results seem to indicate that neither the full hypnotic
trance nor the dream-condition are really favourable to
the working of the higher intellectual processes . 1

Where finished intellectual work, as, for instance, Cole¬
ridge’s poem of Kubla Khan, has been produced in a
dream, there is often reason to believe either that the
dream-state was incomplete — as may have happened in
C oleridg e ’s laud anum-sleep 2 — or that the work has been
afterwards developed by more or less conscious elabora¬
tion in the waking state. The best of the recorded_
dream-work would seem to consist of the occasional,

production of vivid and coherent plots and scenes for
novels, or poems, or dramas. The continuous intel-

1 See above Chap. Ill, p. 72, on t he illusion of great poe try, etc.,
occurring at the lower levels of consciousness.

2 C oleridge says that he composed ‘Kubla Khan’ when sleeping in
his chair from the effects of an anodyne . See Coleridge's Poetical
Works, edited by E. H. Coleridge (1912), Vol. I, p. 296.

208

THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch.9

lectual work known to have been produced in the full
hypnotic trance, though it is often much more finished
and coherent than that produced in dreams, is poor
stuff at the best. And, even if we put aside any doubt
as to whether the poems, essays, and novel produced on
the ouija board by Mr. John H. Curran, of St. Louis,
Mo., under the dictation of Patience Worth , owed
nothing to conscious effort, they are not books which
many of us would read for their own sake.

On the other hand, there is evidence that a slight
o degree of dissociation may be useful, or at least harm=
less, for the purpose of certain kinds of creative thought.
The thinker may be helped in that condition to escape
from some of the habits and inhibitions which hinder

the free association of his ideas. The Indian princes
who, riding away from the stifling atmosphere of
intrigue in their petty courts, used to visit the rishi
seated in a half-trance at the foot of a tree, often heard
from him a much better exposition of their duty towards
the simple problems of their tributary villages than
they heard every day from their ministers or wives or
concubines. The psycho-analyst who boasted that he
could have cured Blake of the habit of trance-thought
might, if he had done so, have made it more difficult
for the English people to feel the significance of certain
factors in the English social system of a hundred years
ago. One torm of slight dissociation — the hallucina¬
tion of ‘voices’ - though it is very like the illusions
produced by serious brain disease, yet has often
occurred in the case of sane persons of strong imagina-

DISSOCIATION

Ch. 9

209

tion, and does not seem to be inconsistent with effective
creative thought. Such ‘voices,’ indeed, may only re-
present an unusually vivid for m of Intimation and
Illumination. Many novelists and dramatists have
described themselves as actually hearing the voices of
the characters which they have created; and in the case
of a person ignorant, as Joan of Arc and Socrates were,
of modern psychology, it is easy for a perfectly rational
opinion to be held that such voices have a supernatural
origin.

It is also important to distinguish between the cases
where automatic inspiration takes place during the full
consciousness of the thinker, and the cases where it
takes place when the thinker is unconscious or only
partially conscious. Plato could see no distinction be¬
tween his own vivid inspiration (or what I have called
Illumination) while writing, with full consciousness^
the PI;,/’tints or the Timants , and the inspiration which
came to the Delphic priestess when she was in a state
of trance . 1 But that distinction exists, and is responsible
for a large part of the difference between real poetry
and science, and the fluent rambling utterances of a
spiritualist medium. T he energy of the highe r mental_
powers seems, indeed, to be diminished by any.
approach to the state of trance; and the nearer Illumina¬
tion approaches hallucination the more necessary is it
that intellectual energy should be maintained through¬
out the whole Illumination stage, and be carried
through to the stage of Verification.

1 Sec above, pp. 55, 56.

zio THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. 9

These problems arc, of course, important, not only
for literature and science, but also for the arts of paint¬
ing, sculpture, and music. The whole question as to the
most favourable physiologico-psychological state for
creative artistic production is now being discussed by
artists in connection with the various forms of ‘post-
impressionism,’ ‘dadaism,’ etc., and it would be an
advantage if the discussions of the psychologists and
those of the artists could be brought into touch with
each other. A s ligh t degree of dissociation may be use¬
ful for an artist who wishes to break with his own habits
of thought and vision and those of his school, but_the
highest form of artistic production seems to take place
when, at the moment of production, a harmony js
attained between an intense activity of the whole
nervous system, higher and lower alike, and the con-

scious w ill. Velasquez and Rembrandt, Mozart and
Beethoven, or Phidias and the Egyptian sculptor of
Nefret-Iti’s bust, seem to me to have, like Dante
and Plato, added more to the inherited treasury of
mankind than would have been the case if they had
dissociated their imagination from their conscious
will . 1

In religious and metaphy sical thought, the problem
of the relation between intellectual creation and full

1 See Mr. Roger Fry’s little book. The Artist and Psycho-analysis
(1924). Varendonck says that we find the greatest energy of imagina¬
tion, and the most valuable creative work, when the conscious ‘volition’
most completely coincides with the subconscious ‘wish’ (Day Dreams ,

p- 303)-

DISSOCIATION

21 I

Ch. 9

consciousness has always been complicated by an argu¬
ment which may be put in the following way: ‘Fgr
human beings the final test of truth is the feeling of con¬

v iction, just as the final test of form is the aesthetic

feeling. One may go through every kind of Verifica¬
tion, by lo gic an d mathematics and.experiment, but the
final test will still b e our feeling of conviction. Why
should we not, therefore, accept the evidence of con¬
viction when it presents itself under circumstances
which do not permit of experimental Verification?’
Dean I nge, for instance, in his touching little tract on
Personal Religion and the Life of Devotion (1924),
while describing a state of mystic consciousness, says
(p. 19): ‘We did not feel as if our ordinary self was in
communication with the Divine Spirit, but rather as if
the Divine Spirit had for the time being transformed
our personality, raising it to a higher state in which it
could breathe a purer air than that of earth, and see
something of the invisible/ No one for an instant
doubts Dean Inge’s personal sincerity. W hy s hould
we not accept the evidence of conviction in his c ase,
when we accept it as the final test i n all o ther
cases?

One might offer the dialectical answer that the feel¬
ing of conviction arising in the mystic state has in the
past supported many different conceptions of the uni¬
verse, taught by many different religions and philoso¬
phies, and that they cannot all be true. But I believe
t hat it is better to insi st th at t he fe eling of conviction,
like the sens ation of sig ht, is never an infallible guide,

i

212 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. 9

and that i t only becomes the be st gui de that we have,
when it is formed, as Aristotle would say, ‘in the right
way, and at the right time.’ 1 We must, that is to say,
go behind our feeling of conviction, and ask ourselves
whether it was formed under those conditions which
experience has shown to be most likely to guard us

against error. William James was, I believe, prevented
from developing his splendidly penetrating examina¬
tion of the process of Intimation-Illumination into a
reliable analysis of the whole process of thought by the
fact that, being himself strongly desirous of retaining
certain opinions, and finding that men and women had
from time to time experienced immediate conviction of
their truth, he never applied Aristotle’s test to those
experiences with sufficient vigour. He protested, with
a vehemence which was unusual in him, against current
interpretations of his phrase ‘The Will to Believe’; but
never satisfied some of his readers that those interpreta¬
tions were wholly unjust. His most careful and con¬
sidered account of his own position on this point is
given in his Varieties of Religious Experience (1903),
p. 422: ‘Mystical states, when well developed, usually
are, and have the right to be, absolutely authoritative
over the individuals to whom they come. No authority
emanates from them which should make it a duty for
those who stand outside of them to accept their revela¬
tions uncritically.’ Here the important words are those
in the first sentence, ‘and have the right to be.’ James
has just been describing in great detail (p. 387 et seql)
1 Ethics, Book II, Chap. Ill, § 5.

DISSOCIATION

Ch. 9

213

the fact that ‘nitrous oxide gas when sufficiently diluted
with air stimulates the mystical consciousness in an
extraordinary degree . . . and I know of more than one
person who is persuaded that in the nitrous oxide
trance we have a genuine metaphysical revelation.’
Have (to use James’s own term) su ch person s the
‘right’ to believe in the validity of revelations so re¬

ceived? We can only answer that, because the human
brain is not an infallible instrument for the discovery
either of positive or of negative truth, no one c an be
absolutely sure that any metaphysical opinion may not
be true , b ut that experience see ms to indicate that con¬
viction reached through such means as nitrous oxide
gas has not been reac hed ‘as it oug ht to b e.’ The
authority of any type of revelation, even to the recipient
himself, should again depend, not only on the circum¬
stances of its reception, but also, to some degree, on its
observed results. Throughout his Varieties of Religious -'
Experience , James refers at intervals to the vivid
accounts of mystical experiences given by Saint Teresa.
Yet he says of Saint Teresa: ‘She had some public
instincts, it is true; she hated the Lutherans, and longed
for the Church’s triumph over them; but in the main
her idea of religion seems to have been that of an endless
amatory flirtation — if one may say so without irrever¬
ence — between the devotee and the deity; and, apart
from helping younger nuns to go in this direction by
her example and instruction, there is absolutely no
human use in her, or sign of any general human
interest’ (pp. 347—8). If Saint Teresa at some moment

214 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch.9

of clear-sighted disillusionment could have seen her
life’s work as James saw it, she would not have ‘had the
right’ to treat the result of her visions as irrelevant to
their authority.

This problem of the relation between the authority

of the feeling of conviction and our knowledge .in any
particular instance of its causes and effects, is vital for
the future intellectual life of India. I have, in talking
to an able Indian friend of my own, found it curiously
difficult to make him realise that such a problem can
exist, or that the reality of a conviction can ever be an
insufficient proof of the reality of that of which we are
convinced. And while hearing Indian students argue
amongst themselves on the part played by mystical
forms of consciousness in the discovery of political
truth, I have felt that the future political history of
India may depend, in large part, upon the solution by
Indian thinkers themselves of the essentially psycho¬
logical problem which is now disguised by its con¬
nection with their religious traditions, and by the
political circumstances of their contact with Western
thought.

On the other hand, in the history of Christianity,
psychological methods of producing belief have existed,
almost from the beginning, which are consistent with a
conscious determination to avoid the dangers involved
in the various expedients for producing the hypnotic
or quasi-hypnotic state. Dr. R. H. Thouless, of Man¬
chester University, said, in his paper on the Psychology
of the Contemplative Life, at the Oxford International

Ch. 9 DISSOCIATION 215

Psychological Congress (1923), that in ‘the Christian
mysticism of the Western C hurches . . . exercises
which have clearly no other end than that of producing
peculiar states of consciousness . . . are not encour¬
aged’ (. Proceedings , p. 131); and Professor Asin Palacios
in his Escatologio Musselmana , says that ‘there is no
hint of ecstasy in St. Thomas Aquinas.’ 1 One, in in¬
tention, non-hypnotic method (of which the best-
known and most authoritative instance is the ‘Spiritual
Exercises’ of Ignatius Loyola) consists of the use of the
fully conscious will in an attempt to direct the train of
mental association upon a desired path, and to inhibit
any associations which diverge from that path. This
method is well described by Professor J. Howley, of
Galway, in a book, Psychology and Mystical Experience
(1920), which bears the official Imprimatur of his
Church, and in which he warns his readers against the
mere production of dissociation by hypnotic methods
(pp. 205 et seql). In discussing (p. 45) the ‘essence’ of
the Ignatian meditation, he says, ‘Those conscious
elements which will not fit into the scheme are promptly
expelled as distraction, and all extraneous thoughts are
carefully checked. This may entail a certain constraint,
but the very effort tends to unification, and the effective
massing of all the conscious elements of value, with the
dispersion into oblivion of antagonistic feelings,
images, volitions, and ideas.’

1 See an interesting letter on Dr. De Lacy O’Leary’s Archaic
Thought and its place in History, The Times Literary Supplement,
Oct. 19, 1922.

216 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. 9

The literature of religious experience shows, how¬
ever, the extreme difficulty of this process. To sit i n the
mental attitude of strained expectancy, with a given
subject of meditation before one, invites the free en¬
trance of associated ideas with as much compulsive
force as for a fasting man the sight of food invites the

access of hunger. Cassian, the founder of monasticism
in France, describes in his Institutes (a.d. circa 419-
426) the struggles against such intrusive thought-
trains of the solitaries in their huts in Egypt. He
quotes, for instance, that which his friend Germanus
said to the Abbot Isaac as to the difficulty of carrying
out a prescribed meditation on a passage in the Psalms:
‘For when the mind has taken in the meaning of a
passage in any Psalm, this insensibly slips away from it,
and ignorantly and thoughtlessly it passes on to a text
of some other Scripture. And when it has begun to
consider this with itself, while it is still not thoroughly
explored, the recollection of some other passage springs
up, and shuts out the consideration of the former sub¬
ject . . . and the soul always turns about from Psalm to
Psalm and jumps from a passage in the Gospels to read
one in the Epistles . . . unable . . . either to reject or
keep hold of anything.’ 1 Cassian says that his own diffi¬
culties arose partly from his early education (apparently
at a school in the south of France) in Greek and Latin
literature: ‘A special hindrance to salvation is added by
that knowledge of literature which I seem already to

1 Wace and SchafI, Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers
(1894), Vol. XI, pp. 405-9.

DISSOCIATION

217

Ch. 9

have in some slight measure attained . . . now my
mind is filled with those songs of the poets, so that even
at the hour of prayer it is thinking about those trifling
fables, and the stories of battles with which from its
earliest infancy it was stored by its childish lessons;
and when singing Psalms or asking forgiveness of
sins either some wanton recollection of the poems
intrudes itself or the images of heroes fighting
presents itself before the eyes ... so that this can¬
not be got rid of by my daily lamentations’ (ibid.,
p. 441).

Professor Howley points out that the experience of
the mediaeval ascetics shows that, if one takes an abstract
proposition as the subject of meditation, and waits for
ideas and visual images to arise from it, full inhibitory
control is almost impossible; and that one of the great^
discoveries of Loyo la was the need of p roviding th£.
young ascetic with a prescribed train of images as well
as a prescribed subject of thought. He quotes Father
Berthier: ‘In the thirteenth century one must strip one¬
self of imaginary images; in the sixteenth one must
multiply images, and even display them in violent
colours. The unmortified imagination, if not supplied
with suitable images, will soon construct a series of
its own, and we shall have conflicting trains of
thought started, and the psychic unity disturbed.
Brother A ss when left unchastised brays’ (l.c., pp. (£>
47 - 8 ).

In certain passages which obviously record his own
intimate experience, Professor Howley describes the

218 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. 9

special difficulties during ‘meditation’ of a modern
thinker whose mind is accustomed to link innumerable
causes and effects into connected systems. One may
imagine him, for instance, while meditating on an Old
Testament miracle, being reminded of something in the
literature of some other religion, and then finding that
his mind has in a moment created a whole scheme of
causation in the development of religious mythology.
‘At times,’ he says, ‘the imagination goes flatly re¬
bellious. A stream of more or less connected and
associated images flickers through like a cinemato¬
graph gone mad or a disordered dream. It becomes,
as it were, something not ourselves of which we are
mere spectators . . .’ (ibid., p. 67). And again (p. 149),
‘We have seen how potent is the new idea springing into,
consciousness. It is a change, and we are curiously
avid of ch ange. The idea effects a lodgement beforewe
are well aware of its nature and our spontaneous atten¬
tion is hooked before the automatic attention of mere
curiosity has had time to die down. Once we are in¬
terested our whole field tends to shift so as to leave the
new notion in the focus.’

I have already argued (Chapter III) that association
of emotions and impulses may be intermingled with
association of ‘ideas .’ The discipline, therefore, of.
‘meditation’ often aims at securing that the train of
emotions as well as the train of ideas and images shall
follow a p rescribed path; but the literature of the con¬
templative life is full of descriptions of states in which,
even if the desired visual and verbal images are secured,

Ch. 9 DISSOCIATION 219

the desired emotions do not follow, and other feelings
and impulses force themselves into consciousness.
Cassian describes how, when he sat down to h is dailj^
meditation, he was afflicted ‘especially about midday.’
(l.c., p. 266) with the conviction that he was wasting
his life in a vain struggle to control the natural train of
his feelings, while the world outside needed his active
help. Alaric, one must remember, had in a.d. 410
sacked Rome; the Vandals were, as Cassian wrote,
destroying the civilization of North Africa; and war and
famine and confusion and ignorance were spreading
over all that was left of the Western and Southern
Roman Empire. Cassian says that the feeling which
invades the ‘solitary’ who attempts without success to
dictate the course of his emotions ‘produces dislike of
the place, disgust with the cell, and disdain and con¬
tempt of the brethren who dwell with him or at a little
distance, as if they were careless or unspiritual ... he
often groans becausfe he can do no good while he stays
there, and complains and sighs because he can bear no
spiritual fruit so long as he is joined to that society
... as if he were one who, though he could govern
others and be useful to a great number of people, yet
was edifying none. . . . Lastly he fancies that he will
never be well while he stays in that place . . . besides
this he looks about anxiously this way and that, and
sighs that none of the brethren come to see him, and
often goes in and out of his cell, and frequently gazes
up at the sun as if it were slow in setting . . . then the
disease suggests that he ought to show courteous and

220 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. 9

friendly hospitalities to the brethren, and pay visits to
the sick whether near at hand or far off . . . and that
he ought piously to devote his time to these things
instead of staying uselessly and with no profit in his
cell’ (p. 267).

One way ^L£g hting against this tende ncy of the
natural ma n to rebel against directed meditatio n i s to
start a train of feeling along one of the paths biologi¬
cally fixed by the major instincts. We form, for in¬
stance, an anthropomorphic conception of a divine
person or personification, and then enter on a series of
instinctive reactions of pity, or humility, or fear, or
loyalty. I have before me a clear and practical little
pamphlet by Dorn John Chapman, the head of the
Benedictine Order in England, called ‘Contemplative
Prayer; A few Simple Rules.’ He is dealing with the
condition of the ‘dark night,’ in which men cannot
‘meditate,’ i.e. cannot bring about the appearance in
their minds of the desired images and emotions.
‘They cannot,’ he says, ‘meditate-it is a physical
impossibility. (When they attempt it, either they can¬
not even fix their thoughts on the subject at all, or else
they fall into distractions at once, in spite of themselves.)
Nor do they wish to meditate ... it is the ordinary
state of mind of most of those who belong to a contem¬
plative order’ (pp. 2, 3). Among other expedients he
recommends the stimulation of the instinct of pity -
‘Most people will find it very easy and helpful to make
the Stations of the Cross in private’ (p. 6); or the in¬
stinct of submission - ‘To feel utterly crushed and

Ch. 9 DISSOCIATION 221

annihilated, incapable of any good, wholly dependent
on God’s undeserved and infinite mercy, is the best
and only preparation for prayer’ (ibid., p. 6). The in¬
stinct most commonly desired to be stimulated is that
of ‘love,’ sometimes as the most exalted type of the
maternal or filial or social instincts, sometimes as a more
or less sublimated sex-instinct. 1 But this expedient of
the self-stimulation of association-trains of instinctive
emotion is only partially and occasionally successful.
When the devotee is not fighting against undesired
feelings and impulses, he often finds himself in the
state of weary indifference which monks and hermits
from the third century onwards called Accidia or
Accidie (from a Greek word meaning ‘not-caring’).
This state has always been recognized as the special
curse of monastic life, and was even included in the
mediaeval list of the seven deadly sins. Father F. W.
Faber, whose Spiritual Conferences (1859) were much

1 Unfortunately some of the ugliest chapters in the history of
religion are those in which the sexual instinct is aroused in its crudest
form by religious observances. The cult of Adonis in the eastern Medi¬
terranean was full of this element (see Frazer, Golden Bough , 1914,
Part 4). The history of early Christian ‘meditation’ shows how con¬
stantly those who gave themselves to contemplation were tormented by
undesired invasions of sexual impulses, and how enormous a part the
struggle against those impulses played in their lives (see e.g. Book VI
in the Latin version of Cassian’s Institutes ). It is fatally easy for such
impulses to transfer themselves, even without the disguise of sublima¬
tion, to an imaged saint or deity. I was astonished to find, in reading
the letters of spiritual direction sent by the well-known Mgr. d’Hulst
to an aristocratic French married lady between the years 1875 and

222 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch.g

read by the Roman Catholic converts of the middle-
Victorian period in England, vividly describes this
state in a discourse on ‘ The Monotony of Piety .’ He
says that ‘Most men in most stages of the spiritual life
complain that piety is monotonous ... I admit it. I
admit it to be my own experience ... I will freely con¬
fess that I know nothing in the world to which I can
compare for monotony the occasional drag of a pious
life, except either the being detained at a country inn
during a hopelessly wet day, or driving a tired horse in
a gig for a long stage which is on the collar the whole
way’ (pp. 333-5). But though Accidie in its original
sense simply meant the absence of the desired emotion,
it came to be used also of that condition in which un¬
desired emotions and images insist on forcing them¬
selves into the empty rooms of the mind. Cassian’s
vivid description, for instance, of the intrusion of
images from literature and of desires for a more active
life is part of a discourse on Accidia. For Accidie, in
both senses, the traditional cures were two: severe and
useless labour, and the self-infliction of serious bodily
pain. Cassian tells us that the fourth-century Abbot
Paul in Egypt used to fill his whole cave year by year

1896, among a good deal of shrewd psychological advice, a number of
passages whose intended and almost inevitable effect seemed to be the
stimulation of crude sexual feeling towards an anthropomorphic con¬
ception of her Saviour. (See The Way of the Heart, by Mgr. d’Hulst
(M. Le Sage d’Hauteroche), translated W. H. Mitchell, 1913, especi¬
ally pp. 2, 4, 5, 8, 73, 222 and xxv.) See also Leuba, The Psychology
of Religious Mysticism, 1925, pp. 137-55.

DISSOCIATION

223

Ch. 9

with palm-leaves, and at the end of the year burn them.
Sometimes in the descriptions of self-inflicted pain one
detects a slight gloating, which seems to indicate what
modern psychologists would call a ‘masochistic’
element in the process. Father Faber, to give one out
of many cases, when speaking of ‘the entanglement
of monotony,’ says, ‘Mortification, especially bodily
mortification, is the shortest way out of it, as indeed it
is always the shortest way to cheerfulness and super¬
natural joy’ (ibid. y p. 352); and again, ‘ Anything lik e
a sati sfactory spiritual life implies a great deal of
s teady^self-punishme nt. A certain quiet unmerciful-
ness towards self is the indispensable condition of
aTTmwa rd peace’ (p. 341).

But at this point the expedient of the fully conscious
direction, along prescribed paths, of the process of
mental and emotional association tends to transform
itself into the simpler and earlier expedient of self¬
hypnotism. The reason why the long hours of weary
struggle against Accidie, followed by monotonous and
useless toil and bodily pain, produce what Father
Faber calls ‘supernatural joy’ and ‘inward peace’ seems
to be that they finally result in the same kind of ‘dis¬
sociation of consciousness’ as that produced by
Boehme’s pewter dish or a dervish dance. In the x >
twentieth-century Catholic advice to mystics there is,
indeed, a frequent tendency to recommend the produc¬
tion of the ecstasy that rewards successful meditation,
not by pain and monotony and nervous fatigue, but by
the shorter and much less painful method of ‘auto-

224 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. 9

suggestion.’ Dom Chapman, for instance, in the little
tract from which I have quoted, recommends the con¬
templative to aim at producing ‘an idiotic state’ which
‘feels like the completest waste of time until it gradually
becomes more vivid’; a state of ‘irrational and unmean¬
ing craving for God’ (p. 4), a ‘curious and paradoxical
condition’ which includes ‘flashes of the infinite - (it is
difficult to find an expression for this) when for an
instant a conception passes, like lightning, of reality,
eternity, etc.’ (p. 5). This i s the dissociated state
described by Eastern and European mystics for the last
three thousand years. Dom Chapman, in describing
the methods by which this condition is to be brought
about, uses almost the same words_as those qsed b y M .
Baudouin in his Suggestion and Auto-suggestion . ‘Let the
acts [i.e. the mental events] come,’ says Dom Chap¬
man. ‘Do not force them. They ought not to be
fervent, excited, anxious, but calm, simple, unmean¬
ing, unfelt. . . . There are to be no feelings. We are
not to know what we mean. ... I speak to beginners.
Let us be thankful if we are like this for no more than
twenty years’ (p. 3). In Professor Howley’s analysis
the contemplative reaches, after the fatigue of his
struggle with the automatic process of association, and
because of that fatigue, ‘t he ultra-violet region of mental
vision ' (p. 165); and ‘the very effort leads to unifica-
tion r ”(p. 45). At the same time Pr ofessor Howl ev
knows, as a sincere student of psychology in the twen¬
tieth’century is forced to know, t hat to b ase one’s whole
religious faith on the psychological feeling of certainty

DISSOCIATION

225

Ch. 9

is to leave oneself unshielded against the thought that
certainty is not the same thing as truth . I could not
read without a stab of sympathy his cry from the heart,
‘Is the sense of unity in totality, of indefectible certi-j
tude, hallucinatory? If so, the Catholic Church is one
vast madhouse . . / (ibid., p. 178). 7

T he I gnatian Meditation has so far prove d to be the_
most successful Christian expedient for directing
thought and belief on to lines laid down beforehand by
an act of will. In every branch of the Christian Church
in which that act of will, among the whirl of modern
historical and psychological criticism, is accepted as a
duty, the Ignatian Meditation, or some modification of
i t T is increasingly used . The powerful Anglo-Catholic
section of the Church of England is increasingly
trusting to Retreats on the Ignatian model for the pre¬
servation of the faith. The Church Times , for instance,
of October 5, 1923, in a leading article on ‘The future
of the Retreat Movement/ said, ‘The Retreat ideal
seized us all unready ... we were too cursory in our
study of the classic models, and notably, of course, of
the Ignatian. . . . We have neglected, especially, to
study the psychology of Retreats and of the Ignatian
in particular. . . . The rigours of a Retreat based upon
the Ignatian principle will frighten some people, but
the prospect of a series of thoughtful and pleasantly
edifying addresses will not stir the emotions of anyoneA
To me, indeed, when I had been reading in the history
of mysticism, there was something which sounded
amateurish and half-hearted in the pronouncement of

p

226 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch.9

the American Episcopal House of Bishops on Novem¬
ber 15, 1923: ‘So far from imposing fetters on our
thought, the Creeds with their simple statements of
great truths and facts without elaborate philosophical
disquisition, give us a point of departure for free
thought and speculation on the meaning and conse¬
quences of the facts revealed by God. The Truth is
never a barrier to thought. In belief as in life, it is the
truth that makes us free.’ The American Anglican
bishops desire, e.g., that their clergy should sit down to
think of the birth-chapters in Matthew and Luke. If
trains of thought start themselves as to the religious
corollaries of the facts there stated, they are to let them
proceed. If thoughts as to the inconsistency of the two
narratives present themselves, or as to the relation of
that inconsistency to the credibility of the narratives
themselves, they are, apparently, to inhibit them by an
effort of will. The Jesuits have proved that such an
inhibition, even in young and eager minds, can still be
brought about. It is to be done, however, not by vague
talk about ‘free thought,’ but by the full rigours of the
Ignatian Meditation.

And in judging the value of the Ignati an Meditation

as an expedient in the art of thoug ht, o ne of the test s
which we should apply to it, as to other forms of intel¬
lectual discipline, is an examination of its results. The
Society of Tesus has been in exist ence for three hundred.
and ninety years . It has recruit ed members from
a mong the ablest, most generous, and most devoted of
the young Catholics of each generation, and has trained

DISSOCIATION

227

Ch.9

them by the methods of Saint Ignatius. It has, since
its foundation, influenced the policy of some of the most
powerful European States. W hat has been its effect in
aiding the development of a peaceful, kindly, and pro-
gressive European civilization?

X

THE THINKER AT SCHOOL

So far in this book I have conceive d mys elf to he
addressing readers who desire to improve their own in¬
tellectual methods and thereby help to diminish the
dangers which threaten our civilization. But the disci¬
pline of the art of thoug ht, if it is to be effective, should
begin at an age when the choice of intellectual methods
will be made, for the most part, not by the student him¬
self, but by his teachers, and by the politicians and ad¬
ministrators who appoint, pay, and to some extent con¬
trol his teachers. In this chapter, therefore, I shall
discuss the art of education as a section of the art of
t hought , that is to say, I shall ask how far a teacher can
hope to increase the future output of c reative thought
b y those thinkers who as students pass through h\§
hands. For that purpose it will be best to start with a
mental pictur e, not of an educational system or a series
of statistical curves, but of some supernormal human
being who has actually added to the intellectual heritage

o f mankin d — Goeth e, Plato, D escartes , Kelvin, or

William James. We can then consider wh at, if suchji
m an were bor n und er our present condition s, his elders,
could do tor him or to him, at the successive periods of
his mental growth, w hich would increa se his efficiency
as a thinker.

If Plato were born now , he would be, as his name¬
sake in Athens was, a living organism which had grown

228

Ch. 10 THE THINKER AT SCHOOL 229

by the repeated subdivision of a single fertilized cell. If
he had grown into a plant, or a marine invertebrate, or
a member of all but a few of the species of fish, and had
had the luck to be a survivor of ten thousand contem¬
poraries, his ‘behaviour-pattern' - his ‘horme' or ‘urge'
— which grew with the growth of his body, and perhaps
in the last analysis was his body, would, after modifica¬
tions due to experience, have enabled him, without help
from his elders, to feed himself, and ultimately repro¬
duce his species. If he had grown into an ant or a bee,
his horme would have been helped out by the behaviour
of his elders in putting food and shelter within his reach.
If he had been one of the higher non-human animals,
his elders would have had impulses to offer him, not
only food and shelter, but opportunities of acquiring
skill in a number of elaborate processes, jumping, or
hiding, or hunting, or obeying summoning or warning
calls; and he would himself have felt rather fitful im¬
pulses both to make use of those opportunities, and also
to think out with some degree of independence his own
solution of the difficult ‘situations' which roused his in¬
terest. Being a human baby, our modern Plato would
be born with a behaviour-pattern much of which he
shared with plants and with other animals. He would
seek his mother's breast as a seedling plant seeks moist
earth, or a young limpet seeks a rock. As the months
went on, he would crawl and chatter, and pick things to
pieces, like a young ape. But as he grew towards child¬
hood, his chatter would turn into vivid talk, his curios¬
ity into conscious wonder and delight, and the ten-

230

-THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. io

dency to recognize a situation and imagine a solution of
it which he had shared with Kohler’s chimpanzees , 1
would turn into prolonged dreamy explorations of tlye
mathematical and metaphysical problems which attract
a clever little boy.

How then, two thousand year s ago, did the elders of
Plato of Athens help him to develop from a clever little
boy into a great philosopher? The Greek word ‘schooj;’
indicates that their first service was to secure him the.

‘leisure’ of a young Athenian freeman. He was not, as
soon as he could walk, set to pick up stones in the fields

or card wool like a slave boy. Nor was he subjected_to
that professional Spartan military training which Plato
himself admired when he had become a conservative
statesman. He played naked for part of every day in the
sunlight of the house-court with his brothers and
cousins, till he was old enough to be taken to the gym¬
nasium for exercise under the eye of a skilled instructor.
By that time he was also attending a school, learning to
read and write and draw geometrical figures, and to
accompany on a little harp his own singing. In summer,
when war allowed, he went to Mount Hymettus, and
picked flowers, and listened to the bees, and watched
where the iEgean showed itself beyond Phalerum. On
great occasions he climbed the steps of the Acropolis,
and saw the sacred processions, and heard solemn
speeches from priests and statesmen. And one d ay,
after his public admission as a citizen, he was free to sit
with shining eyes at the feet of Socrates in a corner of
1 See Kohler, W., The Mentality of Apes (trans.), 1925.

Ch.io THE THINKER AT SCHOOL 231

the Agora, to argue with friends during walks up the
Ilyssus Valley as to the nature of man and God and the
State, or to stay up for half the night writing the stilted
love-poems and discourses at which in later years he
would laugh; and so, after many travels, and with no
clear division between his life as student, and teacher,
and statesman, he became the most influential thinker
in all history.

If Plato were born to-d ay in America or England or
Germany, he would neither be the son of a slave-master
nor the son of a slave. He would be a member of a
community whose educational policy was guided by at
least a half-hearted desire that every citizen should have
the opportunity of developing all his powers; but he
would also be a unit in that type of social organization
which has resulted from the development of mechani-
cal industry, and which I have called the Great Society.
Unless he belonged to the tiny section of his nation
whose members own sufficient accumulated wealth to
be ‘independent,’ he would probably live in one of the
meanly uniform houses of a city street, and be the child_
of parents with few traditions of culture . Nothing in
his daily surroundings would stimulate in him the _
passion for truth and beauty which the Athenian tem¬
ples and porticoes, and the eager talkers and traders and
poets and orators, and the valleys and hills and coast of
Attica stimulated in the earlier Plato. It would be only_
occasionally, as the result of preliminary arrangement,
and perhaps at moments that did not suit his mood, that
he would see the fields in spring time, or be taken to an

232

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. io

intellectually or aesthetically stimulating cinema or pic¬

t ure-gallery, or hear a few words on the wireless from an
interesting man. He might never, throughout his boy¬
hood, be able to spend three consecutive hours away
from the noisy living-room and the noisier street, with a
boy of his own age and tastes. Most of that which
Plato of Athens learnt at first hand from nature and
mankin d, Plato of T .ondon nr New York must learn, if
at all, at second hand, from books and machines.

The great industrial nations may perhaps in the next
hundred years rebuild their cities, and scatter electri¬
cally-driven industries over the country-side. But, for
good or evil, we shall never return to the ‘natural’ short-
r ange environm ent of Plato’s Athgns. Alexander of
Macedon, the pupil of Plato’s pupil, destroyed the
short-range life of the Greek city-state, because he had
learnt from his master to think in terms of maps and
unseen continents. The modern thinker, if he is to help
to control the forces which now bring human society
to order or confusion, must read during his life a library
of books a nd a pyramid o f ne wsp apers, a nd must learn
from science to live at a point of time that is continuous,
with a million years of the past, and at a point in space
which is continuous with astronomical distances. He
must co-operate intellectually with scores of foreign
specialists in handling a body of accumulated knowledge
a thousand times too great for the memory even of Aris¬
totle to retain, and must profit by artificial means of
observation a thousand times more accurate than any¬
thing which Aristotle could have imagined.

Ch.io THE THINKER AT SCHOOL 233

How can we, his elders, help him? Even the Prince
Consort could not invent a machine capable of forcing
his eldest son through all the intellectual processes of a
Prussian ‘state-scientist.’ If we are to help our new
Plato to think, we must have on our side his own horme,
with all its imperceptible gradations from spontaneous
‘urge’ to conscious will. And am ong e very g eneration
of modern educationalists, from Rousseau and Froebel
to the present day, there have always been men and
women passionately convinced that the free ‘urge’ of a
c hild is enough to secure h is full development, that a
child sent to wander in a Thuringian pine-wood will
become a biologis t, and a child left with a balance and a
few test tubes in the laboratory of a ‘heuristic school’
will repeat the discoveries of Archimedes and Kepler.
Their experiments have failed, partly because human
beings do not live for ever, and therefore must practise
economy of time, partly because, i n the art of thought,'
as in other arts, that which experience shows to be the
best wav of doing things is not the way which is m ost
l ikely to occur to one unaided mind. And yet, especi¬
ally in America, the heuristic idea is still continually
rediscovered and continually welcomed. An article, for
instance, in the New York New Republic of April 9,
1924, contains a description of an experimental school
carried on by the New York Department of Education
in connection with the Public Education Association,
and including a section for ‘specially gifted children.’
The Head Mistress is described as believing that ‘There
is no need of hurrying along the teaching of symbols -

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. io

234

any normal child will learn to read before he is ten, if he
is exposed to books by whose who value them. There is
no use in torturing an imaginative child of six or seven
with a dull reading routine.’ Among the ‘gifted chil¬
dren’ in this school may be a potential Alexander Hamil¬
ton, or Louis Agassiz, or Baruch Spinoza, whom the
Public Education Association desire to assist in his pre¬
paration for a life of creative thought. I would seriously
ask that Association whether it is wise to postpone his
learning to read till the age of ten, or to leave to mere
accident the question whether he reads for the rest of his
life easily or clumsily, whether his ‘ideograms’ are letters
or phrases, and whether his brain interprets slight actual
movements of his mouth-muscles, or audile or visual
images, or the meaning of more directly apprehended
ideas and situations. 1 If the school contains a potential
Kreisler, would it be wise to arrange that he should first
learn to play the violin by being ‘exposed to violins by
those who value them’? One has, indeed, a recurrent
feeling that some American educational reformers have
not sufficient respect for the future work of the human
beings whom they are training in the most difficult of

1 But while the extreme Frocbclian conception of the educational
suffici ency of s elf-activity is now more common in America than else¬
where, there is also to be found in American educational literature a
more conscious and definite reaction against it. See e.g. an abstract,
in the Psychological Bulletin (New York), Feb., 1922, p. 78, of a paper
by Grace E. Bird, on ‘The Devious Path of Slow Work,’ in which she
pleads for ‘the direct route of the rapid reader,’ as against the ‘reproduc¬
tion of the bye-paths of eye and throat tensions, inner speech, and
imagery of the slow reader.’

Ch.io THE THINKER AT SCHOOL 235

all arts. One would like to say, in Napoleon’s words, to
those who would keep great talents as long as possible in
that atmosphere of childishness which looks so charm¬
ing to an enthusiastic adult, ‘ Respect the b urden.*

If, however, we accept responsibility for showing the
child what we believe to be the best way to develop his
powers of thought, we must try ourselves to be clear as
to what we mean by ‘best.’ A way of using nerves and
sense-organs and muscles may be best for a young man
of twenty, but not best for a child of six. And a way of
practising thought which would be best for the child of
six, if all human beings died at ten years old, may not
be best for a child of six who will live and work as a
thinker till he is seventy. In that respect, the teacher of
any art must make a delicate compromise between the
powers and needs of the child and those of the future
adult. On the one hand we do harm if we try to teach
a baby of six months old to walk, instead of waiting
until, a few months later, he has developed both the
power and the inclination to walk, or to teach algebra
to a child of three, or if we expect a child of eight to feel
as an adult feels in the presence of certain kinds of great
literature. But, on the other hand, the future violinist
should learn as a child to handle his bow, not simply
in the way which is then easiest to him, but in the way
which, while allowing for his muscular and nervous
immaturity, will also allow for the needs of the adult
executant; the future historian should learn to read at
an age and in a way which will not unduly strain his
immature eyes, but also at an age and in a way which

Ch. io

236 THE ART OF THOUGHT

l will enable him to read both accurately and rapidly in
lafter life; and the future mathematician should be
taught to use, in reasoning, methods based on the recog¬
nition not only that a child can play an easy game with
Froebel’s geometrical ‘gifts,’ but also that the habit of
expressing all quantitative conceptions in terms of
solid geometry may be inconvenient in the performance
of the important duties of an adult mathematician.

One of the most difficult elements in this compro¬
mise is the question how far and at what age the teacher
should aim at teaching the pupil to stimulate his mental
energy by conscious and voluntary effort; and how far
mental energy should be left to grow out of the pupil’s
own spontaneous ‘urge’. Perhaps the best result of
modern educational psychology is the present rapid
advance in methods of recognizing and using spontane¬
ous impulse. But I myself believe that the teacher
should also attempt to find ways of bringing the con¬
scious will of a clever child to bear upon his thought at
least as soon as school attendance begins. The modern
urban environment has so little th a t is autom atically
stimulating to the higher intellect ual impulses that I am
sure that many great talents both in England and in
America have been prevented from fruition because the
experience of full mental energy has either never come
to them at all, or has only come, too late, in the process
of adult money-making. This loss is partly due to the
mistake of most educationalists after, say, 1780, in
exaggerating, by reaction from the educational methods
1 invented in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the

Ch. 10 THE THINKER AT SCHOOL 237

physiological difference between the adult and the child.
We have hardly yet realized that after infancy is over
intellectual growth is in many respects quantitative
rather than qualitative, and shows itself not by the sud¬
den appearance of the power to carry out a particular
intellectual function, but by a gradual extension of the
time during which that function can be carried out con¬
tinuously. This is particularly the case with intellec¬
tual growth after thirteen; a healthy clever man of
thirty differs (if we ignore his greater accumulation of
knowledge and habits) from an equally healthy and
clever boy of fourteen, rather in his power to go on
solving new intellectual problems for eight hours a day,
than in his power to solve a single new problem in a few
minutes. The Binet and other ‘tests' have, indeed,
failed to detect any increase in momentary ‘general
ability' after sixteen. Because the boy will tire sooner
than the man he should rest from work sooner and
longer; but for the healthy boy, as for the healthy man,
the feeling of fatigue, though it is valuable evidence as
to the desirability of continuing intellectual effort, is not
conclusive evidence that the effort should be at once
discontinued. Ever y one who has played games knows
the difference between the primary fatigue, which a
healthy youth acquires the habit of enduring until it is
succeeded by the stage of ‘second wind,' and the ‘stale¬
ness' which, if it is ignored, leads to the pathological
condition of overstrain. And anyone who is to do effi¬
cient intellectual work, either as boy or man, should be
helped to make the same distinction.

238 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. io

After taking my degree, I was for two or three years
employed in preparing boys for the ‘scholarship’ com¬
petitions of the great English ‘public schools.’ My
conc lusi on, based mainly on that experience, is that.a
healthy and intelligent child should, before the age o£
ten, be familiar with the experience of concentrated
attention in the ‘problem-attitude’ of continuous
thou ght, s tarted, and, if necessary, maintained by volun¬
tary effort, for a spell of perhaps twenty minutes. A
healthy and intelligent boy of thirteen is, I believe, all
the better for the occasional experience of mental endur¬
ance carried to the point of primary fatigue, in perhaps
a four-hours spell, and a boy of sixteen should know,
once in a while, the glorious ‘second wind’ which may
come when mental energy is maintained far beyond the
point of primary fatigue. The examination system, as
practised in England, has many obvious dangers;
examination-passing is apt to become an end in itself,
both for teacher and for student; and the nervous strain
which follows from the realization that the opportuni¬
ties of one’s whole future life may depend on the effort
of a few days is often harmful. But a student may, during,
his preparation for an important examination, learn for
the first time what work which is fully up to his powers
(o) feels like , and may see for the first time, as a n intellec-
tual and emotional whole, a book or subject which he
has h ithert o seen only in his daily ‘assig nments.’ Among
the most vivid experiences of my boyhood was a spell of
seven or eight hours which I once went through about
the age of sixteen. I was revising some neglected work

Ch. 10 THE THINKER AT SCHOOL

239

for an examination next day, and I sat through most of
one night, reading by the light of an illegal dark-lantern
and with a tear occasionally sliding down my nose,
Sophocles' tragedy of Ajax. This question of prolonged
effort is, I believe, of special importance for secondary
and college education in America. Mr. H. D. Kitsoji
in his How to Use Tour Mind (1916), p. 171, says of the
American high schools and colleges: \ve indulgently
succumb to the first symptoms of fatigue, before we
have more than scratched the surface of our real poten¬

tialities/ During a discussion, a couple of years ago,
with some of the staff of an exceptionally good Ameri¬
can college, I raised the question of‘second wind.' One
of the group said, with perhaps some degree of exag¬
geration, ‘I don't believe that there is a boy here with
any experience even of primary mental fatigue.'

But as soon as a student knows what it is to maintain
i ntellectual energy by an effort of will, he should be
taught to realize that mental effort, and the mental
energy which may be stimulated by it, vary in intensity
as well as in duratio n. This point is also, I believe,
specially important for the future of American second¬
ary and college education. When Mr. McLoughlin
came from California to the Eastern States of America,
he set a new standard of intensity in the service-stroke
at lawn-tennis; the eastern players were made to feel
that they had hitherto played ‘pat-ball,' and they them¬
selves afterwards crossed the Atlantic to produce the
same effect upon our British players. Since lawn-tennis
is a pastime, of which the purpose is recreation, Mr.

240 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. 10

McLoughlin may have conferred a somewhat doubtful
benefit on the world. Though t, however, is not a pas¬
time, but an art, the successful performance of which is
of enormous importance to mankind; and I am con¬
vinced that hardly any good fortune could come to
American education as great as the appearance of an
educational McLoughlin, who should abolish ‘pat-
bair among all adolescent practitioners of that art. A
distinguished young American writer, who had been
educated at the best of those ‘preparatory' schools which
correspond to the English ‘public' schools, told me:
‘At — we worked hard, but we didn't really know
what hard work was.' Mr. H. D. Kitson seems almost
to assume that intensity of mental energy cannot be ex¬
pected from a clever boy at the age of seventeen.
Speaking of the difference between college work and
high school work, he says, ‘No longer will you have
time to dawdle sleepily through the pages of easy texts'
(l.c., p. 15). A student who has carried the habit of
‘dawdling sleepily' through his work till, at seventeen
or eighteen, he leaves the high school, is only too likely
to continue that habit after eighteen. Anot her Amer i¬
can writer (New Republic , April 2, 1924) says, ‘The
essential problem of education, “how to get from every
pupil hard work but willing," is still unsolved.' Some
American observers believe, indeed, that in that respect
their country is moving backwards rather than for¬
ward. The great American, Dr. Charles W. Eliot, ex-
President of Harvard, had published at the age of
ninety, in his book A Late Harvest (1924), the state-

Ch. 10 THE THINKER AT SCHOOL 241

ment that ‘I began as a boy to use my mind intently
several hours a day’; and the New Republic writer com¬
mented, ‘Probably the mental inertness of the average
American, college-bred or not, is outside the range of
his comprehension.’ The ‘intent use of the mind’ to'
which Dr. Eliot refers may be aroused by an external ' 1

stimulus, but should not be dependent on it; I shall
always remember an American graduate student, who
said to me: ‘Professor Wallas, I came to the London
School of Economics to be stimulated, and I have not 0
been stimulated.’ And the apprentice thinker should,
learn to distinguish between the effort which may be
painful because it is ‘against the grain,’ and the fortu¬
nate energy into which his effort may imperceptibly
transform itself, and which, though it involves a full
concentration of will, is felt as an unhindered harmony
of the whole organism. In the changes and chances of a
thinker’s life he, like Shelley, will have experience of
both.

Intense intellectual energy, however, carried to the
point of fatigue, requires that the Incubation period
before a new thought appears shall be one of real rest,
varying, perhaps, from an hour or two to a month. For
this problem, neither the ‘public school’ nor the munici¬
pal school traditions of secondary education in England
seem to me to have found a solution. The discip line,
i ndeed, since the days of Thomas Arnold, of the Eng- (°)
lish Public Schools may almost be said to hav e taken the
prevention of leisure as its chief object. The Times re-
viewer of aTiistory of Marlborough School, obviously

Q

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. io

242

writing with inside knowledge, contrasts the first years
of the school (when in the 1850’s William Morris used
to wander in the woods round Marlborough) with the
present days ‘when few moments are left unallotted.’
On December 20, 1923, The Times announced that
Mr. J. H . M. Hare had retired, after thirty-nine years’
service as assistant master at Eton. A list follows of his
distinctions in football, cricket, and fives, and a poem
by the Head Master of Eton, beginning:

‘Note how each famous man
Hastes to declare

How life for him began
With Mr. Hare!

Why does he rule the land?

How rise to high command?

Because he learnt it from
W T ise Mr. Hare.’

Mr. Hare himself said in an interview with The
Times representative, ‘I have always taught the younger
boys — the last thirty boys or so to enter the school . . .
I find that boys are more ready to learn than they used
to be, and much more ready to do what is expected of
them. Three things I have always tried to impress on
boys. I have asked them n ever to be doing nothing,
b ut either to work, play, or sleep .’ In some English
‘public schools’ Mr. Hare’s function in the prevention
of leisure is assigned to a professional ‘games-master,’
into whose power the boys are given as soon as lessons
are over, and who is likely to think that the school hours

Ch. 10 THE THINKER AT SCHOOL 243

are chiefly valuable as providing an opportunity for his
boys to rest, and so recover the energy necessary for
victory in their next contest. The dangers of sexual_
perversion, against which the system of leaving ‘few
moments unallotted’ is mainly aimed, are real, so real
that they may ultimately lead to the abandonment of the
whole experiment of keeping boys in unisexual ‘pre¬
paratory’ or ‘public’ (in the English sense) schools for
an unbroken boarding-school life from ten to nineteen.
But I believe that a careful inquiry would show that the_
prevention of leisur e, the attempt to secure that for all
his waking hours except meal-times a boy should either
be sitting in class-room or chapel, or engaged in severely
professionalized games, or working at some allotted
task, is not an effective method of guarding against
s exual dangers . And even if it were more effective than
it is, the general application of the system involves an
i njury to the intellectual culture o f the nation too serious
t o allow one to accept it as the wisest wav of dea ling
with the sexual problem.

In the new municipal secondary schools of Great
Britain or the Dominions the danger from absence of
leisure is apt to arise in a somewhat different form. The
whole future of a clever boy or girl depends on the
results of a series of Junior, Intermediate, and Senior
‘Scholarships.’ My universi ty students have sometimes
complai ned to me that in the preparation for each suc¬
cessive examination they become ‘stale’ and over¬
strained, and t hat they have no opportunity for such a
c ompara tively prolonged rest as will enable ^hem to

244 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. io

r ecover nervous elasticity or to recognizer collect, a nd
s ystematize any new though ts which may be waiting
for the moment of Illuminatio n. The danger in this
respect is greater because the period of severest strain
is apt in both sexes to coincide with the coming of
puberty.

The effort and energy, again, of a student thinke r
vary not only~quantitatively in duration and intensity.
but also qualitatively in respect of the kind of me ntal

process which is consciously attempted. This is a point

which educational tradition has in the main left to the
pupil’s own ‘trial and error.’ He ‘does lessons’ on cer¬
tain ‘subjects.’ Most of these subjects are chosen
mainly in order that his memory may be stored with a
body of knowledge — history, science, language, etc. —
that will be useful to him in his own future thinking and
in his intercourse with others. Some are mainly chosen
in order that he may acquire skill in certain simple men¬
tal processes, mathematical, grammatical, etc. Some
are chosen - literature, religion, music, etc. - in the
hop e that he will expe rienc e certain emotions, and de -
sire certain forms of conduct. The teacher’s time is
spent, partly in oral instruction followed or accompanied
by questioning, partly in the reading, correcting, and
marking of written work, and to a much less extent,
when teaching drawing, music, experimental science,
and gymnastics, in the watching and correction of the
pupil’s muscular movements. The teacher, that is to
say, observes and marks the more obvious results of
thought-processes and not the processes themselves. It

Ch.io THE THINKER AT SCHOOL 245

is therefore almost inevitable that his methods should
tend to encourage the simpler mental processes, and
especially that of memorizing. Professor F. M. Mc-
Murry, of Columbia University, says, indeed, in his
How to Study (1909), p. 9, that he obtained ‘from
students in college, as well as from teachers, brief state¬
ments of their idea of study. Fully nine out of every
ten have given memorizing as its nearest .synonym/
Even if we add to the process of memorizing the pro¬
cesses of understanding, and applying to particular in¬
stances the arguments and principles of the teacher and
the text-book, it still remains, I am told, that the
thought-processes used by students in nearly all Ameri¬
can secondary schools, and during the collegiate years
of nearly all American universities, as well as in many of
the English publicly-supported secondary schools, be¬
long mainly to the stages of thought which I have called
Preparation and Verification, and that in these institu¬
tions a clever boy may go without reproach through his
whole course, with little or no fully conscious experience
of the more vitally important processes of Illumination
and Intimation.

There have been recently introduced, both in
America and in England, certain forms of school organi¬
zation which are - intended to offer the thoughtful pupil
opportunities and motives for discovering and practis¬
ing the more difficult methods of thought. Of these the
best known are Daltonism, Garyism, the Project
Method, the science method of Professor H. Arm¬
strong, and the methods used at Oundle by Sanderson,

Ch. io

246 THE ART OF THOUGHT

and interpreted by Mr. H. G. Wells. The comm on
factor of them all is an arrangement by which the. stur
dents, as individuals or in small groups, undertake, with
occasional suggestions from their teachers, pieces of
intellectual work prolonged over weeks or even months;
the analysis, for example, of the causes of some historical
event, the solution of a small engineering problem, the
writing and staging of a play, etc. I believe that these
experiments - which can, of course, be looked on as ex¬
tensions and modifications of the traditional plan in
some of the older English secondary schools of setting
long literary compositions and long pieces of mathe¬
matical ‘book-work’ — may lead ultimately to important
educational progress. But in these experiments the dis¬
covery and choice of intellectual methods are still left,
in the main, to the students, who do not often succeed
in finding for themselves the best ‘mental attitudes’ and
methods. Mr. Abraham Flexner’s Report, in 1918,
on the ‘Gary Schools’ seems to prove that, in the schools
which he visited, the pupils had not made the elemen¬
tary discovery of the difference between work carried
out with a full concentration of will and the mental
attitude which Mr. Kitson calls ‘dawdling sleepily,’ or
the ‘low-flash’ interest of a not very exciting game.
Still less had they discovered the difference between a
passive waiting for thought and that intense expecta nt
energy which enables the creative thinker at the moment

of Intimation jx^ give ‘a local habit ation and a name’ to
t he elusive phantom of a hovering idea . The founders
of those experimental schools sometimes suggest to

Ch. io THE THINKER AT SCHOOL 247

their students by their own infectious enthusiasm the
necessary form of intellectual effort. In such cases, the
experiment may work excellently as long as the school
is controlled by an inventor who is also an omnipotent
head teacher. But the same school-methods applied by
average teachers to three or four hundred average irrev¬
erent boys or girls, quick to detect pretence, and
i ngenious in escaping the effort of though t, may pro¬
duce unexpected results.

In schools of a more traditional type, a clever teacher,
interested in the mental development of his pupils, is
occasionally able to infer some of the subtler points in
their thought-processes from the character of their
written work, and even from their muscular attitude
and facial expression in class, and to invent words and
phrases which will convey to his pupils the conception
of better thought-processes. Sometimes his phrases are
handed down to his less inventive successors; I can
remember, during my school days at Shrewsbury, the
useful effect of the phrase ‘fatal facility’ as indicating a
bad intellectual habit revealed in the Latin and Greek
compositions of certain boys who had hitherto been un¬
aware of it. At Shrewsbury, also, a traditional saying of
Dr. Kennedy’s: ‘Boy! There is a great deal of Horace in
this copy of verses, and a great deal of Vergil, but no¬
thing horatian and nothing vergilian,’ produced among
us in the Sixth Form an occasional mild desire to dis¬
cover how one should set about thinking vergilianly.
When, in 1885, I was for a short time a public school
form-master, Mr. G. T. Atkinson, the ablest and most

248 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. io

stimulating of my colleagues, once invented another
useful phrase. A small, very intelligent, and very in¬
dustrious boy had come rapidly up the school, and had
reached the Fifth Form, which Atkinson then took. His
Latin compositions in the lower forms had consisted of
the blameless application of known rules. He now had
to do for Atkinson a ‘prose,’ in which a passage of idio¬
matic English was to be turned into idiomatic Latin.
He sat, I was told, pink with pleasure, while my col¬
league praised his composition, and then received a
shock which may have changed in some degree his
habits of thought, when the little panegyric ended with
the words, ‘Yes, a really excellent piece of Fourth Form
prose.’ It would be interesting if some old Wyke¬
hamist would collect the phrases and stories of this kind
which make up part of the trade secret of Winchester
College. Innumerable stories of the same kind have
gathered round the names of the best-known Oxford
‘Greats’ tutors. The late Mr. Richard Lewis Nettleship
is said, for instance, in a story which may be apocryphal,
to have listened with every appearance of admiration
and gratitude to an essay in which a Balliol exhibitioner
who had been the glory of a North Country grammar
school, and the hope of a Nonconformist congregation,
demonstrated by somewhat ‘pat-ball’ a rgum ents that
vi rtuous conduct n ecessarily leads to happiness. ‘You
really do think so?’ said Nettleship ecstatically, ‘I am so
glad. You know that the question has been discussed
for some June.’ And ‘The Nettler’ remained smiling
weetly, until the student experienced a sudden spasm

Ch.io THE THINKER AT SCHOOL 249

of the abdomen, and a sudden conversion to the possi¬
bility of a new type of energy in thought.

But the efficacy of such hints is local and individual;
they are not easy to transfer from the ‘atmosphere’ of
one school or college, or even of one teacher, to that of
another. Their application always arises from the indi¬
vidual failures of a single student, and they are most
helpful when given by a tutor to a student who is sitting
alone with him. When given in a class, they sound sjo
s arcastic as to produce on a sensitive bov or g irl little

effect except humiliation a nd resentment - and they
may also, like other uses of sarcasm, be bad for the
teacher himsel f. I hope, therefore, that, in the course of
the next generation, awareness of the less obvious stages
i n the thought-processes mav come to be produced , not
by individual hints, but by a more general study,
throughout the educational course and in the impersonal
mental attitude of science, of the psychology of
thought. 1

I am well aware of the difficulties involved in such a
proposal. There is still a lamentable want of agreement
among professed psychologists as to some of their most
fundamental problems; and the preaching, for instance,
by an extreme ‘behaviourist’ of the doctrine that con¬
sciousness and will and thought are ‘epiphenomena,’
which, though they unfortunately occur, have no rela¬
tion of cause and effect with human conduct, or by an
extreme Freudian of the doctrine that every non-sexual
idea is a symbol of a sexual ‘wish’ would not be helpful.

1 See my Our Social Heritage (1921), Chapter II.

Cli. io

250 THE ART OF THOUGHT

But a few simple lessons on the physiology of the cen¬
tral nervous system in man and other animals might be
given to children of nine or ten years of age, and those
lessons might be illustrated day by day in the ordinary
work of the class. A short talk drawn from a lecture
which I once heard by Sir John Adams on the psycho¬
logical causes of mistakes in spelling 1 might make a dic¬
tation exercise less dull and much more useful than such
lessons are at present. There is much American statis¬
tical evidence as to the measurable effect on the simpler
processes of thought of securing the early interest of
pupils in their own psycholog y. A number, for in¬
stance, of American text-books have been recently
published on ‘How to Study,' with the intention of
making young students aware of their intellectual pro¬
cesses, and Mr. C. W. Stone says that by a series of
quantitative school experiments, he found that interest
in ‘How to Study’ increased the rate of reading and the
degree of comprehension 180 per cent, as shown by
comparison with a control group of high school
students. 2

1 See also Teacher’s Encyclopedia, Vol. I, pp. x—34 - John Adams
on Child Psychology.

2 C. W. Stone, quoted in the Psychological Bulletin, Jan., 1922,
p-43 • his interesting to notice that even the best of these books, and even
when they are dealing with students who have entered a university
course, seem to assume that their readers will use the easier rather than
the more effective intellectual methods. Prof. Kitson, for instance, in
his book How to use your Mind, which I have already quoted, and which
is intended for students during their first college years, says, when deal¬
ing with the method of language learning, ‘As you look up the words of

Ch.io THE THINKER AT SCHOOL 251

At a somewhat later educational stage, the teacher,
in explaining how one should approach a geometrical
problem, might add to the mathematical rules of Verifi¬
cation a few illustrations, drawn from the psychology
lesson, of the psychological conditions of invention. A
literature lesson to able students of fifteen would cease
to be a mere catalogue of biographical facts, or a mere
series of exhortations to admire or despise, if it some¬
times followed the psychological lines of such a book as
Mr. J. M. Murry's Problem of Style (1922). A science
class might be made to realize, by facts from the mental
history of Descartes or Darwin, that the ^ themselv es
a re experimenting in the use not only of microscop es, ©
mi crometers and balanc es, but also of their ow n brains-
And a clever student could learn before he is sixteen
to se e the processes q£ his own mind as part of t he
larger and infinitely more stimulating problem of mind
in" general. Sir Henry Cockburn (Lord Cockburn)
attended, about 1800, as a young student, the lectures
of James Finlayson, Professor of Logic in Edinburgh
University, on what we should now call psychology,
and says that ‘until we heard him, few of us knew that

a foreign language in the lexicon trying to memorize their English
equivalents, take plenty of time’ (p. 72). But rapidity and pleasure in
learning a foreign language, and its usefulness in increasing fertility of
association, is enormously increased if the student from the beginning
memorizes the foreign word itself, with its direct intellectual and
emotional meaning, instead of compelling himself afterwards to wait
for that meaning until he has first recalled some inadequate English
equivalent.

252 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. io

we had minds; and still fewer were aware that our in¬
tellectual operations had been analysed, and formed the
subject of a science the facts of which our own con¬
sciousness delighted to verify. Neither he nor his class
were logical, in any proper sense of the word. But no
exposition of the mere rules of reasoning could have
been half so useful as the course which he adopted,
which was first to classify and explain the nature of the
different faculties, and then to point out the proper
modes of using and improving them. This, though not
logic, was the first thing that wakened our dormant
powers.’ 1

On the question of the effect of psychological aware¬
ness in education I have myself gathered some amount
of experimental evidence. For the last ten years of my
life as a London professor of political science I deliber¬
ately used what I was able to learn about the psychology
of the thought-processes as a means of helping my
university students to capture and record thoughts
which would otherwise never have come into full con¬
sciousness. I gave my students class-lectures in psycho-
logy outside their political science course, and in per¬
sonal work with my graduate students tried to help
them to a cquire t hat power of observing the emotional
and intellectual ‘fringe’ of th eir thoughts with which I
have dealt in this book. I have before me letters from
four such graduate students. They were all cases of
men who had taken university degrees, after courses
(in a Colonial university, an English training college,

1 Henry Cockburn, Memorials (edition of 1909), pp. 19, 20.

Ch.io THE THINKER AT SCHOOL 253

one of the newer English universities, and an Indian
university), consisting predominantly of memorizing
and reproducing other men’s thoughts. I had explained
to them my conception of the process of associative
thought, and of its relation in the primitive thought-
cycle to emotion, and had constantly urged them to look
out for ‘thoughts of their own,’ and for the appearance

of ‘an emotional s timulus.’ In one case, I found that a
student whose written work was at first singularly
wooden, could talk about his subject with humour and
freshness, and urged him to listen to himself as he
talked. I n another case I found that fr eshness__of
t hought was closely connect ed with literary expression,
and urged the student to grip any telling phrase that
came to him. In both these cases, the students and my¬
self were amused and interested by a kind of discussion
which, if we had not been psychologizing, would have
sounded sarcastic. O ne of them refers.to the fact that
his early work wa sJshowii-tQ-be-axoJlection of snippets
frongvarious authorities,’ and to my urgence that he
should ‘bring what personality he had into the work of
research.’ Another, the student whom I told to strive
for originality by developing his naturally considerable
sense of literary form, writes of ‘the coining of phrases
and the shaping of sentences which would not be woolly
lambs for your sharp knife.’ The third wrote, ‘I feel
that ... I have acquired a “something” — served an
apprenticeship as it were.’ But the most interesting of
the four letters came from the Indian student. He had
passed through an extremely successful course at his

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. io

254

Indian university; and had obtained high honours in a
professional examination during his stay in England.
His education, carried on as it had been entirely in Eng¬
lish, a language which had for him very slight emo¬
tional associations, would not have been different if it
had been intended as a training in intellectual sterility.
All his thoughts, or rather all the phrases and words
which he selected from the books of the recognized
authorities, apparently came to him as visual images of
paragraphs in an examination answer. For months I
despaired of producing any result with him; but he was
a young man of very unusual morale, and he submitted
himself to a course so s evere that, unless he had been
supported by a genuine scientific interest in his own
mental processes, he could not, I think, have endured
it. I first made him take up a social-political problem on
which very few books had been written. I then forbade
him to read anything in literary form, and told him to
get his material from newspapers, official reports, and
conversation with persons to whom I gave him intro¬
ductions. I told him to look at the people in the Lon¬
don streets from the top of an omnibus, and to imagine
their lives and thoughts; and always to watch for the
appearance of thoughts and feelings of his own. All
this time, he says in his letter, ‘I was stu dying hard, but
I felt no emotional stimulus in my work .’ I then told
him to read psychology, and with magnificent industry
he read during several months a series of books on
psychology, ethnology, and anthropology. I also advised
him to write long letters in his own vernacular to a

Ch.io THE THINKER AT SCHOOL 255

favourite brother in India. ‘At last,’ he says, ‘I began
to feel my way a bit. My teache r had b een all thi s time
dinning in my ears “ I want to know what y ou have got
to say of your ow n.” I told him this time that I could
not express what I had to say, but I felt that I might say
something in time. . . . The difficulty of experiencing
wh at my teacher calls “sharp doub ts” is that they make
a havoc in one’s own mental world. . . . My equip¬
ment is not adequate . . . and I experience mental
agony as I feel the hammer of these rough shocks. . . .
I was reading my Thesis only yesterday, and I doubt
many statements of my own, and I feel that if I were to
write again I should begin de novo. I do not know what
will be the result . . . But now I feel one thing which
I never experienced before — an emotional stimulus.’
If my Indian student had, from the age of twelve, been
familiar with the elements of thought-psychology, he
need neither have waited so long for thoughts of his
own, nor suffered so severely during their birth.

XI

PUBLIC EDUCATION

In Chapter X I tried to show that teachers are now
slowly inventing e ducational exp edients, by which ,
e ven under the conditions of modern large-scale civiliza ¬
tion, potential thinker s can b e helped during their
school years to acquire the elements of that art of
thought which they will use in adult life. But the inven¬
tion of educational expedients will not increase the out¬
put of creative thought, except in so far as those ex¬
pedients are actually brought to bear upon the potential
thinkers of each generation; and the degree to which
that is done will depend largely upon the policy of the
administrative persons and bodies who build schools,
appoint and control teachers, enforce attendance, and
draw up model time-tables.

In all modern industrialized communities, at least
four-fifths of education from six to fourteen, and a
rapidly increasing proportion of education after four¬
teen, is now ‘public,' that is to say, is provided from
‘funds raised wholly or mainly by taxation, and appro¬
priated to educational purposes by bodies dependent on
popular election. And almost everywhere, public edu¬
cation, at least from six to fourteen, is compulsory.
The whole of this world-wide system is almost in¬
credib ly new; the political demand which created it
only became important less than a century ago, and
five-sixths of the present vast expenditure on public

256

Ch. II

PUBLIC EDUCATION 257

educatio n probab ly dates, from got more., than forty
years ago . A ny admin istrati ve system so rapidly de¬
veloped in answer to a necessarily simple political de¬
mand, i s cert ain, especially if it makes large use of the
expedient of compulsion, to be at first insufficiently
adapted to the complexity of the problem with which it
deals. And in England, as compared, for instance,
with the United States, or Prussia, or Scotland, public
education is specially new, and was at first specially
clumsy; it was not till 1870 that the elementary state-
aided creedal schools were fitted into something like a
public system, and not till 1876 that educational com¬
pulsion was made general.

The history of English public educational adminis-
tration during the last forty years may be described as a

scries of attempts to remedy the defects which were.

found to have resulted from the over-simplicity of the
original conception o f the problem. The most obvious
of these discoveries was the fact that the ‘average’ chijd
- say, the sixty per cent, of the children in each school
who are mentally and physically nearest the mean - is a
much more complex being, with much more complex
needs during his school years, than was assumed in the
eighteen-sixties and seventies. The legislation of 1870
followed soon after t he adoptio n in 1.861 by the Eng¬
lish government of the policy of ‘Payment by Results,’
the ‘payment’ being the state grants towards the
salaries of the teachers, and the ‘results’ being the per¬
centage of the children who, on the annual inspection-
day, passed certain minimum tests in the use of the con-

R

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. ii

258

ventional symbols of reading, writing, and arithmetic.
That policy has been abandoned, and the modern
‘public elementary school’ has gradually come to pro¬
vide for the acquirement by the average child of many
other forms of knowledge and skill as well as the ‘3
R’s’; and, through handicraft, organized games, school
visits, etc., now aims at stimulating many parts of his
nature besides those concerned either in the memoriz¬
ing of elementary information, or in that class-room
discipline which makes collective memorizing possible.

The second fact which English administrative
authorities have gradually come to recognize during the
last forty years, is the existence of children who, because
of their intellectual or physical subnormality or super¬
normality, have educational needs different from those
of the avera ge c hild. While reading the Parliamentary
debates on the English Education Acts of 1870 and
1876, I do not remember meeting with any sign that
any Member of Parliament then realized that the innate
or acquired individual differences among the working-
class children who were to be compelled to attend
, school constituted an administrative problem. In Eng¬
land the existence of that problem was first recognized
— not by Parliament, but by the local educational
authorities — in the case of extreme mental and physical
subnormality. The English School Boards, which were
established in 1870, found that they were required by
law to bring into their schools a number of children
who were wholly or partially blind or deaf, or so seriously
deficient mentally that they learnt nothing themselves

Ch. ii

PUBLIC EDUCATION

259

and hindered the education of the others; and that
neither funds nor statutory powers had been provided
by the State which would make it possible to create
separate schools for such cases. The number of blind
and deaf children was very small, and almost from the
first the London School Board experimented, without
help from the State, in the provision of instruction for
them by peripatetic teachers and otherwise. There
were at least ten times as many ‘physically and mentally
defective’ children, and it was only in 1892 that the
Board opened a few ‘special schools’ for them, and only
in 1899 that Parliament gave the local authorities power
to deal systematically with the problem. It was not at
first realized that the diagnosis of the various types and
grades of subnormality involved a difficult problem of
technical administration. When I became a member
of the London School Board in 1894 ,1 found that most
of those members and officials who had initiated the
movement for special schools still thought of ‘feeble¬
mindedness’ as a temporary condition which could be
easily detected by non-specialist observers, and easily
cured. The selection of mentally defective children^
was, therefore, at first left almost entirely to the head
teachers of the schools which the children were attend¬
ing before selection. Only in 1898 selection in London
was given to specially appointed medical officers, who
began to work out a technique of diagnosis.

Mental supernormality obviously presents a more

i mportant administr ative problem than mental sub¬

normality; and mental supernormality is remarkable

z6o THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch.n

fo r the extent of its range : th e difference between th e
physical statu re of an average man of five feet seven and
a giant of six feet eight is about twelve per cent., while
the innate intellectual difference between a man of
average ‘general intelligence’ and Aristotle or Einstein
^ may be of the order of five thousand per cerjt. But in
England the recognition of supernormality as affecting
public educational administration came a few years
later than the first attempts to deal with subnormality.
The delay was due partly to the fact that very little
scientific work had been done on innate intellectual
supernormality; partly to a social tradition which in
England, at the end of the nineteenth century, still
assigned compulsory-primary and non-compulsory-
secondary education to different social classes; partly to
the consequent fact that the local School Boards (which
administered the compulsory system till 1903—4, when
they were superseded by the County Councils) were
confined by law, as afterwards judicially interpreted, to
the provision of ‘elementary’ education; and partly,
perhaps, to the fact that, as long as the tradition of
‘Payment by Results’ lasted, an elementary school¬
master gained much more in reputation and income
by forcing a sickly or mentally subnormal child to
memorize the required minimum of the ‘3 R’s’ than by
helping a mentally supernormal child to develop his
powers. The London School Board held, it is true,
in trust, certain ‘scholarships’ enabling a very few
selected children to proceed from the public elementary
schools to endowed non-compulsory-secondary schools;

Ch. II

261

PUBLIC EDUCATION

but the examinations by which candidates were chosen
for these scholarships were not based on any conscious
recognition of a distinction between innate ability and
acquired knowledge. 1 The first large-scale attempt in
London to diagnose innate intellectual supernormality,
as a condition for the entrance of the supernormal mem¬
bers of the child population upon a special public educa¬
tional course, was made by the London County Council.
In 1894 that body offered scholarships, in the new
municipally-aided secondary schools, for competition
among elementary school children. In 1904 I was
elected to the London County Council, which had
taken over the work of the School Board. In 1905 the
Council, under the guidance of Mr. Sidney Webb,
established a much larger scholarship system, which
was intended as a step towards the realization of the
then revolutionary idea that equal educational oppor¬
tunities should be offered to all the abler children of all
social classes. And in the London scholarship com¬
petitions the tests used were (on Dr. William Garnett's
advice) consciously aimed at the diagnosis of innate

1 A few of the old endowed ‘public schools’ in England were, during
the last third of the nineteenth century, tending to base their competi¬
tions for the ‘scholarships’ offered to specially prepared upper-class
boys rather on innate ability than on acquired knowledge. When,
between 1881 and 1884, I was employed to prepare boys for such
scholarships, I was told that the Winchester College authorities drew
up their examination questions mainly with the intention of testing
innate ability; and my main work was the production in my pupils of
those mental habits which would enable a naturally clever boy to show
his cleverness.

262

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. 11

ability as distinguished from educational acquirement. 1

Meanwhile the methods and interests of psycholo¬
gical science were beginning to be extended from a sur¬
vey of the general human type to the observation and
measurement of individual mental variations. As early
as 1883 Francis Galton had argued that the measure¬
ment of intellectual qualities was p ossible. 2 The sub¬
ject was later studied on experimental lines by psycho¬
logists in America (by Cattell), Germany, and France.
Binet and Ebbinghaus, between 1890 and 1900, began
to collaborate with educational authorities in contriving
(mainly for the detection of subnormality) tests which
should reveal different grades of ‘general intelligence.’
By 1Q1 x the Binet-Simon tests were in administ rative
use in Paris, and in 1917 the whole system received an
immense advertisement from the adoption of the Ter-

man modification of the Binet-Simon tests for the grad¬
ing of recruits in the new American army, and from the
considerable success of its use in rapidly selecting men

1 E.g. the competitive examination (at the age of 11 +) for the Lon¬
don County Council Junior Scholarships was confined to an English
essay and a few arithmetical problems whose solution required intelli¬
gence rather than knowledge and which, in fact, closely resembled the
problems afterwards set in the upper grades of the Binet-Simon tests.
This was partly due to a desire to prevent the more ambitious elemen¬
tary schools from neglecting, as it was thought, their own proper
function in order to compete with the secondary schools; but it was
mainly due to a policy of selecting the naturally able children for special
education.

2 F. Galton, Enquiries into Human Faculty and its Development
(1883), especially pp. 49-55, 83-112, and 185-202.

Cli. 11

PUBLIC EDUCATION

263

fit for intensive training as non-commissioned officers.
Intelligence tests have led to much exaggeration, and
many hasty generalizations as to the political and social
rights of ‘Nordics’ and other people. But their intro¬
duction has been the occasion for a general advance,
which is still going on, in the technique of diagnosing
innate mental ability; and any education authority
which desires to do so can now adopt, with some pros¬
pect of success, a policy of special treatment for super¬
normal as well as for subnormal children. 1

Neither England, however , nor any other community
possessing a system of public e ducati on, has yet pro-
gressed far towards developing the full powers of each

generation of potential t hinkers. In populations where
there has been so much racial intermixture as in Ger¬
many, France, and England, it is probably the case
that innate intellectual power is distributed with some
approach to equality among the social classes. If that
is so, and if every class enjoyed equal intellectual oppor¬
tunities, the five-sixths of the population which con¬
sists of manual workers and their social equals ought in
those countries to provide five-sixths of the highest
intellectual work. But a rapid glanc e over Whoj Who,
or any other dictionary of contemporary biography,
indicates that in England, and probably in France and
(Germany, at least five-sixths of the highest work during
the last thirty years has been done by the small minority
of the population who do not pas s through the ele-

1 See the Report of the Consultative Committee to the English Board of
Education , on ‘Psychological Tests of Educable Capacity’ (1924).

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. n

264

mentary school s. The position becomes clearer if we
examine the cases where persons of working-class origin
have been successful in pursuits involving intellectual
work: their success has been greatest in politics and in
commerce, where an able man finds it most easy to make
up in later life for early disadvantages, and where full
experience of the conditions of life among the average
population is sometimes a positive advantage: they
have been least succ essful in literature, science,
philoso phy , fine art, and those occupations where
continuous effort prolonged from childhood onward is
^necessary for the highest achievements.

The main causes of the fact that a supernormal
Englis h child of workingrdass origin is much less likely
to be a creative thinker than an equally supernormal
child of middle-class origin are, of course, to.be found in
the present distribution of the national income. The
ordinary English working-class home contains few

books, and is too crowded and noisy for much leisure

and day-dreaming . The father spends the day in
severe manual labour, is too tired in the evening to
answer the questions of a clever child, and has little
intellectual experience of his own; the mother either
goes out to work or spends the day in housework.
Above all, in a middle-class home, unusual ability in a
child is certain to be detected by the parents; and the
supernormal middle-class boy, and to a less extent the
supernormal girl, grows up in an atmosphere of con¬
stant expectation of a life of successful intellectual work.
In this respect the average English working-class home

Ch. II

PUBLIC EDUCATION

265

is changing rapidly, but ha.s not yet acquir ed the trar
dition of the average middle-class home, or even work¬

ing-class Scottish or Jewish Jiome.

The question, therefore, before us is not how far
has compulsory public education prevented those who
would otherwise have done conspicuous intellectual
service from doing so, but how far has it been so
organized as to counteract with the greatest practicable
efficiency the social conditions which would otherwise
have made such service impossible. In attempting to
answer this question, it is best to divide the elementary
course into the ‘junior’ elementary course from 5 to
11 +, and the ‘senior elementary course from 11+ till,
at present, 14. My own impression is that, excellent as
the junior course often is for the child of average ability,
it is not often suitable for the supernormal child, for
whom the classwork is almost always much too slow,
and for whom it is difficult, in an elementary school, to
arrange individual work. Therefore, even at that early
age, school organization should, I believe, be based, to
a much greater extent than is at present attempted, on
innate intellectual difference, either by forming classes
inside all large schools where supernormal children can,
without being unduly pressed, work at the pace which
is best suited to them, or by setting up, in closely popu¬
lated districts, a few small schools for such children
within easy reach of their homes.

The provision of public education for children of the
‘senior elementary’ age of 11 + to 14 is at present in
England, and indeed throughout the modern industri-

2 66

Ch. ii

THE ART OF THOUGHT

alized world, admittedly unsatisfactory. Too many
c hildren leave school after fourteen on th e first day that
i t is legally possible for them to do so . a nd often do so.
not merely because their parents require their wages,
but because they themselves are ‘sick of schooling.’

Mr. k. H. Tawney, for instance, in the pamphlet on

Secondary Education for All , which he edited in 1922
for the British Labour Party, after describing the
defects of the existing system, says ‘the burden of the
parent’s complaint is that between twelve and fourteen
the child is marking time in the primary school; that
the child himself (as he well may be) is sick of school¬
ing; and that it is no good raising the school age be¬
cause, as it is, the later years are largely wasted’ (p. 76);
and, ‘Too often [public education] ... is in the nature
of a course which must be covered because the law
requires it, but which ends in a cul de sac , and leaves
the child eager to start its real life elsewhere, when
school is happily over’ (p. 76). Because of this boredom
supernormal children whose parents might have kept
them longer at school often go willingly at fourteen
into some monotonous ‘blind-alley’ occupation. An
English local Director of Education states that ‘head
teachers of elementary schools aver that, year by year,
boys of exceptional promise, who are potentially valu¬
able assets to the community, are lost in the vast indus¬
trial whirlpool’ (Tawney, he., p. 72). And, since release
from school at fourteen coincides with the mental and
physical changes which accompany puberty, the know¬
ledge and mental habits acquired at school are at that

Ch. II

PUBLIC EDUCATION

267

age most easily forgotten. There is, therefore, at this
moment, an important political movement in favour of
raising the age of compulsory attendance at least to
sixteen. That movement is most definitely supported
by the Labour Party. At the conference, for instance,
of the Independent Labour Party in April, 1924, after
a speech by Mr. C. P. Trevelyan, then Minister of
Education in the Labour Government, a resolution was
unanimously passed that the party educational policy
should be to ‘raise the school-leaving age to eighteen,
and provide maintenance grants where necessary’ (Daily
Herald , April 22, 1924). The British Labour Party is
based mainly on the trade unions, and, in a time of
unemployment like the present, a trade union audience
is certain to be attracted by a proposal which not
only seems to give to the working-class boy or girl
educational advantages which have hitherto been con¬
fined to the property-owning classes, but postpones
for two or three years the entrance of many hundreds
of thousands of new competitors into the labour
market.

The Conservative Party has not yet (largely, it seems,
for financial reasons) declared itself in favour of any
raising of the compulsory age; and the Liberal Party,
in the manifesto of the National Convention of Liberals
on January 29, 1925, confined itself to the aim of
‘securing for young persons of fourteen to eighteen
years of age some form of continued education.’ But it is
probable that an agitation for raising the ‘school age’
would meet with much support both within the Con-

268

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. ii

servative and Liberal parties, and, outside the party
organizations, from the teachers, and from the officials
who administer the present system. The Director, for
instance, of Education for the county of Gloucestershire,
when submitting, in 1920, his scheme for secondary
educational development in the county, said, ‘When
secondary education becomes free and compulsory up to
the age of sixteen, as no doubt it will within such time as
Authorities in their schemes should survey and provide
for . . (Tawney, l.c., p. 59). But, just because a rais¬
ing of the English school-leaving age is likely to take
place in the near future, it is necessary that we should
realize the complexity of the problem on which we are
legislating, instead of discovering, as we did after the
legislation of fifty years ago, the over-simplicity of our
ideas by later experience. I t is no light matter fo r any
state to assume the responsibility of c ompelling by police
power the attendance of the wh ole population at school

past the age when Milton was already a poet, Nelsonji
naval officer, Napoleon a lieutenant of artillery, Alex¬
ander Hamilton a political writer, Bentham an Oxford
graduate, Sir Philip Sidney a formed scholar, Mrs.
Siddons, Sarah Bernhardt and Ellen Terry professional
actresses, and Mozart and Beethoven famous musicians.
It is clear, for one thing, that if we are to pass a law
extending educational compulsion even to sixteen, we
should reconsider our existing machinery of compulsion.
The machinery which was set up in 1870 and 1876 was
intended to break down the immemorial habit among
the poorer working families of either sending the chil-

Ch.n PUBLIC EDUCATION 269

dren out to work as soon as they could earn, or keeping
them, and especially the elder girls, intermittently at
home to help in the housework or in some domestic
industry. In the country villages, where compulsion
was often directed by bodies a majority of whom were
well-to-do farmers, who wanted as much child labour
as they could get, the law was often at first ineffective.
In the northern manufacturing towns a ‘half-time’
system was allowed which dovetailed a gradually in¬
creasing measure of compulsion into the existing fac¬
tory regulations. In London and the large Southern
and Midland cities, where compulsion was directed by
keen educationalists on the School Board, the law was
drastically enforced. I myself took part in that enforce¬
ment in London, at a time when it was still a new
experiment, and when the change in family habits
which it involved was still incomplete. From 1889 until
I became (in 1894) a member of the London School
Board, I used, as a ‘school manager,’ to hold a sort of
local court in which I decided, with official advice,
what working-class parents in a very poor district should
be recommended for prosecution for the non-attend¬
ance, or irregular attendance, of their children, 1 and
therefore (since neither the London School Board nor
the London magistrates, in whose courts all prosecu¬
tions took place, had much time to give to individual
school-attendance cases) practically what parents in my

1 1 was supposed to be acting as a member of the ‘Notice B’ com¬
mittee of local managers, but as a rule no other member of the com¬
mittee used to attend.

Ch. xi

270 THE ART OF THOUGHT

district should be fined, and, in case of default, im¬
prisoned.

I was carrying out a policy laid down both by Parlia¬
ment and by the elected School Board, and I myse lf
b elieved that almost any hardship was better than that

a child should arrow up without education . But I am

now surprised when I remember how severe was the
system which I helped to administer. In some cases I
recommended the prosecution of a working widow with
young children for keeping the eldest daughter at
home; although I knew that the result might be to
send the whole family into the workhouse. The system
bore with equal severity on the children themselves;
occasional truancy was dealt with by corporal punish¬
ment at school, and, since the reputation of an English
elementary head teacher then depended largely on the
percentage of attendance made by the children on his
roll, some headmasters and head mistresses were known
to force up their percentages by continual caning.
Boys guilty of inveterate truancy were sentenced by the
magistrate, at the request of the School Board, either to
long terms of imprisonment in ‘Industrial Schools,’ or
to short terms in penal ‘Truant Schools.’ On his
second appearance at such a Truant School a boy re¬
ceived, as a matter of routine, a heavy flogging. It
was only at the end of the nineteenth century, when,
after thirty years of compulsion, the habit of school
attendance had been created in the working-class dis¬
tricts of London, that the London Truant Schools were
closed, and the severity of the whole system was dimin-

Ch.n PUBLIC EDUCATION 271

ished. 1 But meanwhile the perpetual presence of
young rebels whom only the fear of imprisonment kept
in school at all, and whom it was practically impossible
to expel, made the preservation of mass-discipline in
large classes the supreme duty of every elementary
teacher, and that fact reacted disastrously on the intel¬
lectual atmosphere of the schools.

But if compulsion is to be extended to sixteen or
eighteen, those who administer it will have to deal not
only with instinctive truancy, or with the desire of care¬
less or selfish parents to profit by their children’s labour
(a desire which can be partially obviated by a system of
‘maintenance allowances’); but with cases where both
child and parent are intensely, and sometimes rightly,
convinced that some form of ‘real life’ wpuld be better
for the child both now and in the future than the pro¬
longation of school attendance. T hey should, ther e-/
fore, remember that education is only a means of attain¬

i ng human excellence, and compulsion only a very
crude means of attaining education ; and that, if the

1 Compulsion of such severity would have been politically impossible
if it had been applied to the more articulate middle classes; but the
school attendance officers in London were told not to visit houses whose
annual rental, judged from the outside, was £40 or over (though the
attendance of children from such houses if they were once put on the
register of a public elementary school was compulsory); and a corre¬
sponding limitation was made in other parts of England. It was
assumed that parents from all homes economically above those of the
working classes would either educate their children at home or send
them to schools with higher fees than could be paid by the working
class.

272

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. n

excellence desired, or any approximation to it, can be
obtained with less compulsion or no compulsion, the
presu mpt ion should always be against compulsion and
m favour of liberty and otl he greater personal happi¬
ness and subtler adaptation to individual conditions
which liberty makes possible. They should think of
themselves as a doctor might who gives his patients a
drug which is often necessary, but who is constantly
on the look-out for opportunities either of not giving it
at all, or of giving it in the smallest effective dose. The
local superintendents of compulsion and their assistants
should, therefore, be chosen from men and women of
wide outlook and fresh sympathy, in close contact both
with the realities of working-class life, and with the
after-careers of those who have left the schools. In
their offices the children and young persons whose cases
come before them should be represented, not by a list of
names, but by case-papers at least as full as those of a
good hospital and containing all relevant information
known to those local authorities who are responsible
for the prevention of disease and crime and the relief of
destitution; and the educational case-papers should be
open to the officials of those ‘juvenile employment
committees’ who might wisely have their offices
in the same building. However complex such a
system might seem, it would be less complex than the
facts as to each individual child which the educa¬
tional authority is now tempted to treat with rough
uniformity.

One of the simplest tasks of the superintendent

Ch. it

PUBLIC EDUCATION

273

would be to risk, in consultation with the head teachers
and school doctors, some loss in regularity of attend¬
ance if thereby they can secure for the working-class
child the advantage of such occasional bona fide breaks
in the routine of school life as the middle-class child
now enjoys. But his main duty would be to increase
the element, throughout the whole system of public
education, of individual educational adaptation and
freedom of choice. When new school accommodation is
required in a large town the attendance superintendent
should preside over a technical inquiry which should
report whether, instead of an ‘ordinary’ school, one or
more ‘special schools’ should not be provided, to which
children, after medical and educational advice and con¬
sultation with parents, should be assigned, or admis¬
sion to which should be open to the most suitable
among those qualified candidates who voluntarily pre¬
sented themselves. In any case the existing law, by
which no compulsion applies to a child whose parents
can convince a fair-minded magistrate that he is prob¬
ably being efficiently educated outside the compulsory
system, should be retained, and in such decisions a
wide connotation should be given to the word ‘edu¬
cated.’ Perhaps all prosecutions either of children or
parents for resistance to compulsion should come before
a ‘children’s court,’ the magistrate of which had special
qualifications and experience. Where no prosecution
was involved, the superintendent of compulsion or his
representative would deal with all difficult problems as
far as possible in direct contact with the parents, and

s

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. ii

274

in the temper rather of a wise and authoritative adviser
than of a policeman.

When I was a member of the London Technical
Education Board five and twenty years ago, a boy
appeared in one of the elementary schools with a
marked genius for design. We took trouble to secure
him the best teaching, and, after his course at a school
of art, a public-spirited maker of stained glass who was
one of our members took him as an apprentice. But
the boy soon found that he could sell his drawings, as
Holbein did at his age, and went away, to become later
the editor of rather an aggressively modern art maga¬
zine. His action may have been unwise, but if we had
been required to compel, if necessary by imprisonment,
his full-time attendance at schools and classes till six¬
teen or eighteen, the effect on his artistic development
and personal happiness would not, I am sure, have been
good. The superintendent of compulsion would attach
special importance to the cases of those few boys and
girls as to whom there was evidence that they might be
capable of doing conspicuous intellectual service to the
community. He would study the lives both of men
and women who had done such service in the past, and
of those who in the past had failed to fulfil their early
promise; and would listen open-mindedly to every
doubt in his own mind, and every suggestion from the
parents or the student himself, that some way of spend¬
ing his time other than school routine would at that
moment and for that student be better.

It is equally necessary that when we are making

Ch. n

PUBLIC EDUCATION

275

‘secondary’ education compulsory we should be clear
as to what we mean by that term. In the minds of most
members of Parliament the words ‘secondary education’
probably represent a vague combination of three ideas
— education given to persons between the age of twelve
and eighteen, education such as is now given in
‘secondary’ schools, and education which is not
‘technical’ (in the sense of preparing for some definite
occupation) but ‘general.’ In the official statement of
policy edited for the Labour Party by Mr. Tawney all
these ideas are combined. Compulsory full-time educa¬
tion is to be given to all children except the subnormal,
which is defined as meaning to at least three children
out of every four (p. 67). Secondary education is to be
varied according to local needs, ‘it must reflect the
varying social traditions, and moral atmospheres and
economic conditions of different localities’ (p. 28), it
must ‘develop so as to keep pace with the development
of the pupils’ (p. 29); but the cost per student of all
secondary education must be the same, and students
must not be sent to different schools because of an
expectation that they will in their adult life undertake
different kinds of work; ‘children should not be segre¬
gated in different institutions at eleven or twelve merely
because at sixteen or seventeen they may enter different
occupations’ (p. x 11); ‘We have not yet gone so far as to
establish vocational schools for intending doctors, law¬
yers, or those who intend to take the higher branches of
engineering. A good general education is the first
essential, whatever calling a boy or girl proposes to

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. n

276

follow' (p. 110); ‘a boy does not need less opportunity
for games because he is going to be a blacksmith and
not a business man; nor has Providence provided the
future clerk with smaller lungs than the future direc¬
tor; nor should teachers be paid less for teaching boys
and girls in central schools [i.e. the proposed sub-
technical schools] than for teaching their brothers and
sisters in secondary schools' (p. 112); and all secondary
teachers, in whatever type of school, ‘must have had a
university education and training' (p. 114).

In order to show that the proposals of his party are
practicable, Mr. Tawney refers to the United States,
where ‘secondary education is normally a continuation
of primary education; not, as in England, a separate
and parallel system, to which some slender bridges have
been thrown' (p. 56), and where ‘some twenty-eight
per cent, of the children entering the primary schools
pass to high schools' (p. 26). This reference to the
United States indicates exactly the considerations which
convince me that the proposals of Mr. Tawney's party
would not be sufficient to protect the intellectual life of
the nation from the dangers arising from the extension till
sixteen or eighteen of anything like the existing system
of educational compulsion. The American high schools
are part of a unified course of public education; their
teachers have nearly all passed through a university;
the curriculum is often carefully adapted to the social
and economic conditions of the localities in which the
[ schools are situated; and yet it is generally agreed by
American educationalists that the high schools are the

Ch.n PUBLIC EDUCATION 277

weakest element in the American educational system.J
Mr. Leon B. Richardson, for instance, of Dartmouth
College, in a studiously moderate discussion of the
problem (The Liberal College , 1924), concludes that
‘speaking generally t he colleg e labours under this
handicap, that the students who come to it are not
sufficiently trained by the schools below in boldness in
facing intellectual problem s, and in habits of intellectual
concentration, to enter as profitably as they might
on the later stages of their educational careers.’ An
American educationalist who is in as good a position
as anyone to know the facts wrote to me (in June 1925)
that ‘it is a matter of general agreement that . . . the
secondary school is the weakest part of the American
system of education.' He gives as a cause of this the
fact that America is ‘apparently becoming committed,
in one way or another, to universal secondary educa¬
tion’ ; that there are several states in the Union requir¬
ing attendance upon a full-time basis up to and includ¬
ing the age of 16 +, and 2 8 states which require the part-
time attendance at the secondary schools of employed
youths of the secondary age; and that there is a ‘general
belief that youths of different types or even with dif¬
ferent objectives should not be segregated in separate
schools. . . . The Intelligence Quotients of youths en¬
rolled in High Schools range, from 75 or 80 to 150, or
the point of genius.’ When in 1925 the Bureau of
Women in Industry in the state of New York reported
that ‘many of the children went to work not on account
of any great need of wages, but apparently because of

278

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. xx

boredom in the class-room,’ 1 they seem to have referred
to the early years of the high school as well as to the
more elementary grades. For the potential thinker,
‘boredom in the class-room’ means, not merely a tem¬
porary loss of happiness, but the compulsory produ£=
tion of intellectual h abits which j yvill be fatal to hi s—
future efficiency

1 New Republic , April 8, 1925.

XII

TEACHING AND DOING

Mr. R. H. Tawney, in the book from which I have
already quoted, hopes that it is possible s o to o rganize
compulsory education up to sixteen or eighteen, that it
will be ‘loved and not merely tolerated’ (Secondary Edu-
cation for All, p. 76). That hope is based, in part, on the
results which he expects from a plan of professional
‘self-government,’ which is supported by his party, by
many members of other parties, by the trade unions,
and by all the organized bodies of teachers in England.
He says that ‘the aim should be to make our educational
system an organic unity, alive in every part, served by
teachers united, self-governing, and free’ {ibid., p. 123).
At present, the English movement towards professional
self-government for teachers is concentrated on an
attempt to secure powers for the Teachers’ Registration
Council (a body recognized by the State, and consisting
of representatives elected by voluntary organizations of
primary, secondary, specialist, and university teachers),
similar to those possessed by the General Medical
Council, as representing the medical profession, and by
the Benchers of the Inns of Court and the Council of
the Law Society, as representing the legal profession.
At the Annual Conference of the politically powerful
National Union of [mainly elementary] Teachers in
1925, which was visited by the President and the Per¬
manent Secretary of the Board of Education, a motion

279

2 8o THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. 12

was unanimously carried in favour of a list of resolu¬
tions prepared by the Teachers’ Registration Council,
and based on a policy long advocated by the N.U.T.
This scheme was summarized by the mover as making
‘the Teachers’ Registration Council the disciplinary
body — the only body which could unmake a teacher,'
and ‘the diploma-granting body — the only body which
could make a teacher.’ 1 Mr. Roscoe, the Secretary of
the Teachers’ Registration Council, expressed at the
same Conference the hope that ‘the teachers might be
masters in their own house,’ and said that ‘the British
public already understood and was ready to pay tribute
to the claims of a learned profession.’

In the spring of 1925, the Teachers’ Registration
Council sent a circular letter to the Academic Councils
of the English Universities, and to other representative
bodies of teachers, asking their support for the pro¬
posal that, after January 1, 1930, no teacher (except by
leave of the Teachers’ Registration Council in excep¬
tional cases) should be legally employable in any institu¬
tion receiving grants from public funds, who had not
been placed on the Register after a period of pedagogic
training, and who did not conform to regulations
regarding the professional conduct of teachers to
be drawn up from time to time by the Council.
The circular justifies this proposal by saying that at
present ‘there is nothing to mark off the teacher from
any reasonably well-educated person who can obtain

1 The Schoolmaster and Women Teachers' Chronicle , April 17, 1925,

p. 708.

Ch. 12

TEACHING AND DOING

281

employment in a school or can secure private pupils/ 1

In a great modern industrialized state, where there
may be perhaps a quarter of a million or more
teachers, some system of national teachers' registration
is probably necessary. Local education authorities
when engaging teachers, like local health authorities
when engaging doctors, require help in ascertaining the
real name of any applicant for employment, whether he
has done the service and passed the examinations which
he puts forward, and whether he has ever been a crim¬
inal, or has been dismissed by a public authority for dis¬
graceful conduct. And the central government requires
help in ascertaining the same facts in the case of those
teachers or doctors whose salaries they help to pay. But
the whole history of professional organization since the
‘guild' system of the late Middle Ages shows that if a
monopoly of service is given to the persons on the regis¬
ter of any profession, and the right to admit to and re¬
move from that register is given to a body consisting
of representatives elected by the profession, the right of
registration will be primarily used to secure the inter¬
ests of the existing members of the profession, as pro¬
ducers, against the rest of the community, then living
or still to be born, as consumers. In drawing up, for

1 The terms of the circular were somewhat altered in a series of long
resolutions submitted by the Teachers’ Registration Council to a con¬
ference on June 13, 1925. But the policy of the two documents seems
to me to be identical, and to be more clearly expressed in the circular
as sent out to the Universities and approved by the National Union of
Teachers,

282

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. 12

instance, conditions of admission, the desire to raise
salaries by restricting numbers will always prove more
influential with the voting majority than the desire,
which will be constantly proclaimed and often sincerely
felt, to increase professional efficiency. And the discip¬
line enforced by the right to remove names from the
register will, as years go on, aim mainly at the protec¬
tion of members of the profession from such a com¬
petition among themselves or from outsiders as shall
increase the severity of the effort needed to secure a live¬
lihood in the profession. 1 The terms ‘professional
ethics’ and ‘professional reasons’ have, indeed, acquired
in the legally self-governing professions, and in the
voluntary organizations which in fact control many
legally unregulated professions, a peculiar and unmis¬
takable meaning.

It may be that the proposals of the Labour Party and
the Teachers’ Registration Council will never be carried
out in full. But it must be remembered that those pro¬
posals have extremely strong political forces behind
them. The majority of the inhabitants of Great Britain
are urban working men, an overwhelming majority of
whom may soon decide to vote for a Labour govern¬
ment based on the trade unions. ‘Self-government’
for the National Union of Teachers (the members of
which spring from the working classes and are in sym¬
pathy with them, and who would form five-sixths of a

1 See the important articles on Vocational Organization by S. and B.
Webb in the New Statesman during 1915, and my Our Social Heritage
(1921), Chapter VI.

Ch. 12

TEACHING AND DOING

283

unified teaching profession) would appeal to voters who
desired to weaken the power of the old English ‘govern¬
ing class.’ 1 Unfortunately, however, the scheme which
offers the shortest and most obvious way towards happi¬
ness and self-respect for the teachers does not neces¬
sarily include all the conditions likely to provide help and
stimulus for the future thinkers among their scholars;
and it is in that respect that the control of compulsory
education up to sixteen or eighteen by the majority of
those voting in a number of stiffly professional teachers’
associations will, I am convinced, involve a serious dan¬
ger to the intellectual life of the nation. I do not expect,

1 The National Union of Teachers has done more than any other
body to destroy the intolerable social atmosphere which resulted from
that power. When, in 1925, the National Union of Teachers met at
Oxford, their President quoted, with the angry and triumphant cheers
of his audience, a memorandum on Training Colleges issued, as recently
as 1842, by those two genuine friends of education, J. K. Shuttleworth
and E. C. Tufnell. ‘I n the formation of the character of the school ¬
master the discipline of the training college should be so devised as to
prepare him for the modest respectability of his lot. W ithout t hespirit
of self-denial he is nothi ng. . . . When the scene of the teacher’s"
exertions is in a neighbourhood which brings him into association with
the middle and upper classes of society his emoluments will be greater,
and he will be surrounded by temptations, which, in the absence of a
suitable frame of mind, might rob him of that humility and gentleness
which are among the most necessary qualifications of the teacher of the
common school. He should be accustomed to the performance of those
parochial duties in which the schoolmaster may lighten the burden of
the clergyman. For this purpose he should learn to keep the accounts
of the benefit club. He should instruct and manage the village choir,
and should learn to play the organ.’

284 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. 12

indeed, that under such a control, the English public
educational system would sink so low as did Oxford
when the university was controlled by the ‘self-govern¬
ing and free’ college fellows, or would become so intol¬
erant as the ‘self-governing and free’ Church of the
fifteenth century, or even so closed to new ideas as are
the self-governing Benchers of the Inns of Court. One
imagines, a generation after the passing into law of the
programme of the Teachers’ Registration Council, the
existence of three or four thousand big new English
secondary schools, with sunny class-rooms and ample
playing fields, staffed by men and women with univer¬
sity degrees in pedagogy, most of whom would, at least
up to the age of forty, enjoy addressing their classes, be
proud of their powers of discipline, and interested in the
prestige of their schools. Summer courses for teachers
would be popular, where lectures on methods of memor¬
izing would alternate with picnics and private meetings
of supporters of rival candidates for the next election of
the Teachers’ Registration Council, and particularly of
the ‘forward party’ who would always demand higher
salaries, longer compulsion, a closer monopoly for the
registered teachers and a stricter professional discipline.
In the schools there would be much that was pleasant
and useful for the average boy and girl. The class dis¬
tinctions which are still the curse of English social life
would be no more noticeable than they are in Australia,

or Western Canada, or Indiana. There would be plenty
of prizes for diligence and knowledge; England might
regain her supremacy in all the national games; and

Ch.iz TEACHING AND DOING 285

there would be a good deal of ‘student self-government’
controlled by popular and successful boys and girls who
had the happy instinct of publicity.

But, scattered about among the schools, one or two
perhaps for each big school, would be the potential
thinkers of the nation, those who might have been
Shelley, or Einstein, or Kelvin, or George Eliot, or
William James, or Bernard Shaw, hating the compul¬
sory attendance, the compulsory lessons, the compul¬
sory or semi-compulsory games, and the ‘student
activities.’ One of them would occasionally pour his
whole soul into a long clumsy essay, or a satirical poem,
or produce an involved mathematical argument which
even the most sympathetic Master of Arts among the
teachers would not, when faced with the professional
objection to work out of school hours, find time to un¬
derstand. B ut, as the years went on. th eir hunger for
thought,would sl owly lose its edge; and when some
crisis, economic, or political, or military, or religious,
came upon the nation, some of those who might have
given leadership would be silent.

I believe, that is to say, that the supporters of the pre¬
sent claims of the Teachers’ Registration Council are
often as blind to the complexity of the problem of train.-
i ng human beings in the use of their minds as were the
makers of the ‘Payment by Results’ Code of 1861, or
those who in 1870 and 1876 introduced compulsory
attendance in England without distinguishing between
deaf and hearing, or mentally defective and mentally
supernormal children. Part of this over-simplicity is,

286 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. 12

due to the inevitable tendency of the teacher to ignore
what the trade unions call the ‘demarcation problem’
between the teaching and the practice of an art. That
problem has long been recognized in the teaching of
any art the practice of which is controlled by an estab¬
lished profession. The doctors, for instance, have
always claimed that they and they only should give
medical education. But, as medical education has be¬
come more thorough, quarrels have arisen, all over the
world, between the practising doctors and the teachers
who are not doctors or not practising, as to their respec¬
tive rights in the ‘medical,’ ‘preliminary medical,’ and
‘scientific’ education of the future doctor; and those
quarrels have led, either to gross inefficiency, or to a
series of delicate adjustments involving the organized
co-operation in the medical course of practising doctors,
doctors who during their tenure of teaching-posts are
forbidden to practise, and non-medical chemists and
biologists, under the ultimate control of universities and
other partly lay bodies. And similar difficulties will cer¬
tainly arise as soon as any serious attempt is made to
improve English legal education.

The present outcome of many such disputes seems
to be an agreement that in all kinds of ‘technical’ educa¬
tion the State ought to reject the old professional claim
that every practitioner should be given a monopoly
right of communicating his art to his successors in such
spare time as he chooses to give to teaching; but, at the
same time, that the teachers of any stage in the training
of an art ought not to be allowed to become out of

Ch. 12 TEACHING AND DOING 287

touch with technical practice. The teaching, for in¬
stance, of the art of painting, in the school of the English
Royal Academy of Arts, used to be given by the mem¬
bers of the Academy when they felt moved to do so.
The result was unsatisfactory, and, after the Great
Exhibition of 1851, Prince Albert created a National
Department of Art at South Kensington, where retired
officers of the Royal Engineers, who would have
thought it ungentlemanly to sell or even paint a picture,
organized the training of thousands of candidates for
the ‘Art Master’s Certificate,’ who were to spend their
lives in teaching ‘art,’ but who never acquired, or were
intended to acquire, any experience of professional
artistic creation. This, on the other hand, was found to
involve too great a separation between teaching and
doing, and the British Government appointed, a few
years ago, a well-known artist with a gift for organiza¬
tion as head of the Royal School of Art, only to discover
that a new demarcation problem had arisen, and that a
protest, which was ignored, was made by members of
the profession of ‘art teacher’ against the appointment,
on the ground that the post ought to have been given to
a ‘Certificated Art Master.’

Unfortunately, however, in the case of ‘general’
education, the existence of any demarcation problem as
to the relation between teachers and practitioners has
not yet been recognized. ‘ Generally educated persons’
do not form an organized profession, which can claim
to control wholly or in part its own training. The pro¬
fessional teachers, therefore, of ‘general education’ feel

288

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. 12

no hesitation in claiming a demarcation of their function
based on the principle that it is entirely separated from
the practice of any art but that of teaching. And some
of the theoretical advocates of a completely ‘functional’
society make a sudden jump, from the proposal that all
forms of technical education should be absolutely con¬
trolled by the Guilds of practitioners, to the proposal
that ‘a minimum of civic education . . . might be best
assured by the State charging the National Union of
Teachers with the powers necessary, and the consequent
responsibility to society for carrying it out.’ 1

My whole argument, however, in this book, is_that
an art of thought exist s, that the pr a ctice of that art is
one of the most important activities of human society,
t hat training in that art should be part o f the education
of the future thinker, and that in this, as in other cases,
a complete separation between teaching and doing wiU
be fatal to the art itself. The necessary solution, there¬
fore, of the demarcation problem in training for the art
of thought, as in training for the art of medicine, cannot
be brought about by the simple method of giving abso¬
lute self-determination either to the teachers or to the
practitioners, or even to the teachers and practitioners
combined against the public as consumers. It can only
be worked out by a process of invention, in which many
different factors in the problem will be considered. In
the first place, teachers of general education, especially
to supernormal students beyond the age of twelve,

1 National Guilds , by S. G. Hobson, edited by A. R. Orage (1914)*
pp. 268—71. See my Our Social Heritage (1921), Chap. VI.

Ch. 12

TEACHING AND DOING 289

should, if possible, have some experience of intellectual
production, and that experience should not cease when,
before becoming teachers, they take a university degree
or other form of ‘qualification.’ Many of those who
remember their own years at school under the present
comparatively free system of appointing secondary
teachers, can realize that eve p a small p ro p ortion of i n¬
tellectual ‘doing’ may give life to teaching , j ust as a tiny ,
percentage of certain vitamines may give life to food.

In my time, in the sixth form at Shrewsbury, the one 1
master from whom any of us, I believe, received any real
intellectual stimulus was Mr. A. H. Gilkes, afterwards
Head Master of Dulwich. 1 He was a born teacher, but I
am sure that a great part of his stimulating influence on
boys came from the effect on himself of the fact that he
wrote and published a few not very good little books.,.
Many literature masters and mistresses would g ain
enormously in their powers of tea ching if they tried for
six months to live by literary production , or even if they
once sent a poem anonymously to a provincial paper,
and had it rejected or accepted. And the teacher of
‘science,’ as a part of‘general’ education, who has never
attempted to add to the body of his science, is not likely
to help a future scientist during his school years. Thg_ q
combination of creative experience with teaching e x-
pcricnce might also be provided by giving certain
teachers ‘part-time’ work for all or part of their careers;

1 See Mr. H. W. Nevinson’s Changes and Chances (1904), p. 25, in
a chapter giving an extraordinarily accurate description of the intel¬
lectual atmosphere of the Shrewsbury sixth at that time.

T

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. 12

290

or by occasionally appointing as school-teachers men
and women who had already had whole-time experience
of intellectual work outside; or by making it easy for a
teacher to transfer to other whole-time work, either per¬
manently or for a ‘sabbatical’ period, when he feels
‘stale.’

Education in the art of thought is not, of course, the
only function of a schoolmaster or schoolmistress; a
teacher has to create many habits in his students which
have little to do with the art of thought. And experi¬
ence of intellectual creation is not the only requisite for
the efficient teaching of the art of thought itself; every
teacher must have sufficient pedagogic skill and tact to
enable him to bring his experience to bear upon his
'students. Nor can we ever expect to staff our schools
with teachers who are equally good as disciplinarians, as
thinkers, and as expositors. The combination, there¬
fore, of these qualities in the persons actually appointed
to any post should vary with the nature of the post.
Disciplinary skill, and knowledge of and sympathy with
the physiological and psychological problems of typical
childhood, would be most important for the teachers of
very young or of subnormal children. Experience of
intellectual creation, and sympathy with its methods,
should have greater weight in the appointment of
teachers of children likely themselves to become pro¬
fessional intellectual workers. A young art-student
) gains more in the studio of a good painter who is a
\ second-rate teacher than in the studio of a bad painter
who is a first-rate teacher.

Ch. 12

TEACHING AND DOING

291

But recognition of the fact that an art of thought
exists, and that ‘general' education has among its pur¬
poses the purpose of training in that art, should in¬
fluence the position not only of the teacher but of the
student. A prevalent theory for the moment among
English politicians, is that all students should receive, up
to sixteen or eighteen, an education which has no refer¬
ence to any special way in which they will live as adults,
and that at sixteen or eighteen they should all begin to
be prepared for a definite and life-long career. This
theory overlooks two important considerations. In the
first place a large part of the essential work of the world
is done by those whom the Teachers' Registration
Council would call mere ‘reasonably well-educated per¬
sons,' that is to say, persons whose activities are no more
confined within water-tight professional compartments |
than were those of Plato or Goethe or Leonardo da
Vinci. When Mr. Maynard Keynes, or Mr. W. H.
Page, or Sir Josiah Stamp, or Hermann von Helmholtz
began to live the life of thought, they did not know, and
those of them who are still alive do not now know,
whether their most important work would be done as
explorers in this or that science, or as writers, or admin¬
istrators, or teachers. At any moment such men may be
offered and accept a professorship, or the presidency of
a university, or an ambassadorship, or membership of
a national or international commission, or the editorship
of a newspaper, o r may retire i hr ji couple of years of
strenuous meditation while producing a book. On such
men's work the future progress of human society largely

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. 12

292

depends, and it is not a pleasant reflection that we shall
hear, during the next thirty years, increasing protests
against the payment of public money for reporting on
the national accounts to men who are not ‘qualified’
accountants, or for contriving methods of fighting
against plague to men who are not ‘qualified’ physicians,
or to ambassadors who are not ‘qualified’ diplomats, or
to professors who are only ‘reasonably well-educated
persons.’ 1

And, in the next place, an education which aims at
preparing young people to earn their livelihood as adults
by sitting for varying periods of five to eight hours a day
at a desk or laboratory bench, and chasing, in spite of
fatigue and disappointment, the elusive phantoms of
their brains, should, even if it is called a ‘general ’ edu¬
cation, be recognized as a preparation for a special kind
of career, which most men and women are neither
capable of following, nor desire to follow. The lives of
the consulting chemist, the consulting accountant, the
historian, the novelist, the judge, and the philosopher
are in many other ways unlike each other, but they are
all like each other in being instances of the specialized
occupation of professed thought.

1 The recent Departmental Committee on the Training of Teachers,
in their Report (1925), p. 161, proposed that ‘members of Training
College staffs should be required to have successfully completed a course
of training, and should be expected to have experience of teaching in
Public Elementary Schools.’ If we are to avoid both pedagogical
inefficiency and intellectual inbreeding it seems equally clear that most
teachers in Training Colleges should have gone through that course,
and that some should not.

Ch. 12

TEACHING AND DOING

293

The master question, therefore, of public education,
both in England and in America, is whether the com¬
munity is prepared to give, as part of a publicly pro¬
vided system, to those who are naturally fitted for the
occupation of professed thinker, a training which is
suitable for them and unsuitable for the average student;
and any further extension of the age of compulsion will
raise that question in its sharpest form. At present, in '
England, about ten per cent, of those who pass through
the elementary schools go on to secondary schools, most
of them after selection by examination. If this percent¬
age is raised, as the Labour Party propose, to seventy-
five per cent, or even to the twenty-eight per cent, now
reached in the United States, the community will have
to decide whether it shall offer to a small, highly super¬
normal minority of that percentage an education which
will be necessarily more expensive than that which can
be offered to the much larger numbers of students who
are nearer the average. One can present the problem
most clearly by proposing a definite experiment. Mr.'
Cyril Burt reports that one per cent, of the child popula¬
tion of England have, at ten years of age, the mental
development of fi fteen, 1 these children being distributed
t hrough all classes of the community . A local educa-/
tional authority which covered a sufficiently large popu¬
lation might perhaps be induced to make an attempt
to discover these children, and might offer those who
were selected admission to a small school, say, with a

1 Report of Education Section of the British Association in The
Times , Sept. 1, 1925.

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. 12

294

junior department from the ages of twelve to fourteen,
and a senior department from fourteen to sixteen or
eighteen. Half of those who received the offer might
accept it. Some of them, after being admitted to the
junior department at twelve, might leave, if they proved
to be unsuited, without disgrace at fourteen; others
would be first discovered at fourteen, and would then
join the ‘remove’ from the junior to the senior depart¬
ment.

From the beginning, it would be intended to give
the students of such a school the kind of help for which
as adult thinkers they would afterwards be grateful.
Since the life of creative thought requires, more than
any other life, free and constantly renewed personal
volition, care would be taken to avoid as far as possible
the atmosphere of compulsion. No one would be ad¬
mitted except on the application of his parent and him¬
self, and every one would be free to go at any moment,
and to share the life of others at his age. As long as he
stayed, ‘maintenance grants,’ if necessary, would be
given to him as they would be given to those of his age
who were receiving other types of public education. If
there were more suitable candidates than there were
vacancies, admission would be given, as it would be
given in a school of music or painting, by a strict
estimate of the probability of future good work, and
without any attempt at arithmetical equality in the pro¬
portion of places assigned to the different classes or
sexes.

Nature, of course, draws no sharp line, even if our

Ch. 12 TEACHING AND DOING 295

skill in psychological diagnosis were sufficient for us to
discover it with certainty, between Mr. Cyril Burt’s one
per cent, and the one or two per cent, who would just
not reach his standard of selection; and therefore success
in such an experimental school would influence, and
would be intended to influence, as the success of
Balliol College, or Winchester College, or Johns Hop¬
kins University has done, the methods of other institu¬
tions. But those who were responsible for the school
would themselves concentrate their attention on the
difficult task of making its own success possible. They
might, under the existing law, choose the staff of the
school as the British Government chose the head of the
Royal School of Art, by methods which would bring
them into conflict with the professional organizations of
teachers, and which the acceptance by Parliament of the
Teachers’ Registration Council’s scheme would render
illegal. Helped, perhaps, by a small advisory council,
on which two or three literary men and scientists would
sit with two or three successful teachers, they would
choose the head teacher and his assistants with a con¬
stant reference to the needs of professional intellectual
production. ‘Trained’ and ‘registered’ teachers would
be, of course, eligible, but they would not have a mono¬
poly of appointment. Because the school would some¬
times have to compete in the open market of intellectual
producers, salaries would not necessarily correspond to
the professional teachers’ scale, and the school, like a
good studio, would welcome the periodical help, either
as lecturers or as ‘visitors,’ of persons who did not

Ch. 12

296 THE ART OF THOUGHT

primarily think of themselves as teachers. The more
permanent staff would be encouraged to take periodical
unpaid or half-paid leave, in order to write a book, or
carry out a piece of research; or some of them might, in
young middle age, pass to a combination, under univer¬
sity conditions, of teaching and professional intellectual
production, or might cease to do any teaching work. If
they joined a professional body in order to protect their
own interests, they might prefer an ‘open’ form of
organization on the lines of the Society of Authors
rather than a ‘close' form of organization like that
desired by the National Union of Teachers and enjoyed
by the Inns of Court.

I have discussed, in Chapter X, some of the pro¬
blems of teaching method which would arise in a school
which consciously aimed at preparing young people to
earn their livelihood by practising the art of thought.
These problems would, of course, mainly be dealt with,
in my imaginary experimental school, by the teaching
staff; the literary student would, for instance, learn to
take the sort of notes which he would use afterwards as
a writer, and the young essayist or verse-maker or
scientific experimenter would learn to watch his In¬
timations as the professional poet or critic or scientist
must do. The students would be encouraggd to read
real books, rather than either extracts from books.or
the easy reflections of text-book writers about books.
Since words are the means of embodying and communi¬
cating thought, they^would be; asked to ac quire a pro¬
fessional conscience in the use of words. They would

Ch. 12

TEACHING AND DOING

297

learn t o dist inguish between ‘fatal facility/ even of that
higher type which sometimes secures first classes at a
university, and the uncertain and often slow processes
of Jh^jpjceative thinker* 1 These considerations would
also influence the arrangement of work for the indi¬
vidual student. His time-table would be the under¬
pattern of the carpet, and might be allowed to look
untidy, if the intellectual life which was the upper
pattern were well harmonized. The advantage of regu¬
lar habits during the student years is great; but the
optimum point at which the curve of that advantage
cuts the curve of the advantage of fresh initiative is
different for those whose professional work will be in¬
tellectual origination, and for those of different powers
and aims.

From the beginning, the public authority and its
advisory committee would co-operate with the teach¬
ing staff in creating the ‘atmosphere' of the school.
They would try to avoid the dangers of ‘institutional¬
ism/ and to remember that the social value of the school
as a corporate entity consists of its effect upon individual
students, and that therefore the interest of a student
should never be sacrificed to the interest of the school.
Above all, they would aim at securing that the indi¬
viduality of every student should be respected, as a wise
editor respects the individuality of his young contribu¬
tors. Charles Lamb was at ‘Christ's Hospital' school

1 See Sir J. M. Barrie’s Sentimental Tommy (especially Chap.
XXXVI) for a study, one supposes autobiographical, of an innate
literary temperament at school.

2 9 & THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch.12

from 1782 to 1789, having Coleridge and Le Grice as
his school-fellows, and James Boyer as his headmaster.
Life at Christ’s Hospital in the eighteenth century in¬
volved constant and severe physical hardships, and the
educational organization of the school was in many ways
deplorable. But the school had the immense advantage
that it allowed scope for the growth of individuality. A
quarter of a century after he had left school, and when
the ideas started by the French and American Revolu¬
tions had produced a widespread desire in England for
improvement in school organization, Lamb met a re¬
forming schoolmaster in the coach from Edmonton to
London. In his essay on ‘The New Schoolmaster’ he
says that his acquaintance, ‘upon my complaining that
these little sketches of mine were anything but methodi¬
cal, kindly offered to instruct me in the method by
which young gentlemen in his seminary were taught to
compose English themes.’ Lamb says, ‘You may derive,
t houghts from others : your way of thinking, the mould
li nto which your thoughts are cas t, must be your o wn.’
l His teachers~at~Christ’s Hospital must have from time
to time savagely reproved him for the form of his com¬
positions. He must later have had eager discussions
with Coleridge and Lloyd and Leigh Hunt, and per¬
haps with the editor of the London Magazine , on literary
form. But there was a subtle difference between such
discussions and reproofs and the smooth-running ‘mass-
production’ methods of the New Schoolmaster, which
since his time have so often in England and America
baulked the individual urge of intellectual creation.

Ch. 12 TEACHING AND DOING 299

Nearly forty years ago, I was one of the seven members
of the Fabian Society who had just written their drafts
of the Fabian Essays, and had appointed Bernard Shaw
to edit the published volume. I was a schoolmaster, and
Shaw was already a professional, though not yet a suc¬
cessful writer. One of our difficulties was that the seven
of us included minds of very different types, especially,
perhaps, those of Mr. Sidney Webb and Mr. Hubert
Bland; and I, with my schoolmaster’s outlook, was
greatly struck by the fact that Shaw, when discussing
the kind of revision which he should urge on the
essayists, said, ‘I’m not going to Webbulize Bland or
Blandulate Webb.’

Those who provided buildings and organization
would aim at giving the school itself an individuality
which could be loved and could stimulate. The clever
sensitive boys and girls who came to the school, either
as boarders or as day students, from dull homes, might
find there something answering to t heir vagu e_veam-
ings for b eauty and significance in_ life. It might be
placed in or around an abandoned seventeenth-century
country house, which the suburbs of a manufacturing
town had enclosed; or a public-spirited architect might
welcome an opportunity of showing that a modern
building could be beautiful without being too expen¬
sive. Some artists might be glad to send copies of their
best prints, and some authors their best books to a place
where they might help their future fellow-craftsmen.
When the school was twenty years old, the students
would begin to be aware of the achievements of their

300

Ch. 12

THE ART OF THOUGHT

own predecessors. Care would be taken to preserve
specimens of the school-work of those students who
seemed likely to ‘make good’ by later service to the
community; so that when some former student died,
after a life’s work as writer or administrator or scientist
or teacher, the students could see in the school library
his early exercises, and the teachers could realize that
some of their own students though younger might be
abler and more important than themselves.

And the school would not, even for the students,
stand as an isolated fact. The life of a creative thin ker
requires, from those who live it to the en d, not only
opportunity and innate intellectual ability, but a sus¬
tained desire for something which is not money¬
making. Those, therefore, who were trying to create
the first emotional and intellectual traditions of such a
school would have to decide whether they should
stimulate a conscious relation between the school work
and the work of the world outside, or rely, as the great
English ‘public schools’ and the American schools
founded on their model, often rely, on the growth of a
half-conscious habit of co-operation, of a ‘school spirit,’
within the school, which might afterwards be used
for public service. A writer, for instance, who was
obviously himself an experienced ‘public school’
master, reviewed Mr. H. G. Wells’s life of‘Sanderson of
Oundle’ in the London Times of January 18, 1924.
Sanderson had said that ‘schools should be miniature
copies of the world — should move on towards becoming
always a microcosm of the new world.’ To this The Times

Ch. 12

TEACHING AND DOING

301

writer replied that ‘the doctrine involves the view that
boys and girls are little men and women. They are
nothing of the sort, and many hold that this doctrine
throws upon the growing child a sense of responsibility
which is too great for childhood. Childhood has its own
responsibilities, but to impose upon it the altruism
which belongs to the adult may be, and some think
must be, educationally dangerous, and likely to defeat
the end aimed at. The irresponsibility of childhood is a
valuable asset.’ The same idea is often expressed by the
simile of the expanding circle. If a boy in his first year
at school is made to feel that the athletic success of his
‘house’ is overwhelmingly important, in his third year
he will, it is claimed, desire the success of his school,
and as he grows up his ‘school spirit’ will automatically
spread to the larger interests of his university, his
nation, and his empire ,and ultimately, perhaps, the
League of Nations.

This argument, when applied, as The Times reviewer
would apply it, to a school like Oundle, that is to say
to boys of perhaps an average age of fifteen, well above
the average intellectually, and most of whom are being
prepared for a life of brain work, and even more if it
were applied to the more highly supernormal students
whom I am imagining, involves, I am sure, a serious
psychological error. Anyone who has followed the
after career of those of his school and college contem¬
poraries in whom school-spirit and college-spirit were
most intense, or who has been present at the annual
gathering of the ‘alumni’ of an American college, or has

302

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. 12

watched the pleasant grey-haired, well-dressed men
outside the Pall Mall Clubs on the days of the Eton
and Harrow cricket-match, will realize that if it is
desired to open during school years a path for wider
intellectual and emotional associations, it is best to aim
at that result directly, and to secure the conscious co¬
operation of the students in the process. A boy, for
instance, is more likely to think and feel fruitfully about
the League of Nations at thirty if at fourteen he writes
an analysis of the ‘Corcyrean chapters’ of Thucydides,
or the policy of Castlereagh, with the day’s telegrams
from Geneva or Paris in his mind, than if he hurries
through his work because he is excited about the
chances of his house or school in a coming match. The
biographies of men and women who have done great
intellectual service (of Milton, or Kelvin, or George
Eliot, or Bentham, or Keats) show in fact that, long
before either the leaving age, or the average age, of
Oundle, most of them realized the social significance
of their work. This feeling of significance will, of
course, not be continuous; it may only occasionally
penetrate into full consciousness after some school cele¬
bration, or when writing a long-meditated essay, or
during a summer afternoon’s walk in the lanes near a
school where a Mr. Hare has not filled every moment of
leisure with professionalized games, or when a clever
lad first hears the mysterious word ‘genius’ used of
himself. 1

1 The Head Master of a London County Council secondary school,
attended mainly by boys drawn at the age of 11 + from the elementary

Ch. 12

TEACHING AND DOING

303

There is, of course, no infallible way of training human
beings, however carefully selected, for creative thought.
Of a hundred students who seemed at twelve or four¬
teen years old to be fit entrants for such a school, it
would be fortunate if twenty finished, a dozen years
later, an educational course at school or college, or
perhaps in a foreign laboratory. Of the rest, some
would have failed, some would have already undertaken
of their own will the life of self-supported intellectual
creation, and others would have been earning their live¬
lihood for several years as teachers, or chemists, or
journalists, or engineers, or minor government officials
— perhaps in some cases to be stimulated in after life
by their early memories to greater service. Out of the
twenty perhaps two or three would give themselves
to those forms of philosophical, scientific, social and
literary thought for which our present social organiza¬
tion offers no early or large pecuniary reward. Some of
the students when they had passed through the change,
in their case less perceptible than in other cases, from
service by learning to service by doing, might, one
dreams, form a little society like Gokhale's Servants of

schools, published a novel called The Bay Boy (R. Gurner, 1924).
As a novel the book is naught, but it contains an extraordinarily inter¬
esting first-hand description of the relation between the new administra¬
tive problems and the old ‘public school’ traditions. He is, I think, not
quite sufficiently aware of some of the considerations which I have
urged above; but he is speaking of a school intended rather for the
most supernormal thirty per cent of the population than for the most
supernormal one per cent.

THE ART OF THOUGHT

Ch. 12

304

India, or, in their original intention, the Greek Letter
societies of the American universities, or might keep
up the sort of intimacy with each other which is a
tradition among those who have been members of the
Society of Apostles at Cambridge.

I have striven to give my scheme of a little experi¬
mental school reality by the invention of detail; but I
still feel that it will seem fantastic when it is compared
by the organizers of public education with the solid
facts of the thousand students of an American high
school, or the ten thousand students of a Western
State university, or with a great new English municipal
secondary school . 1 But it is only after long dwelling
in an imaginary world that the present world itself
begins to look fantastic, and that one sees sub specie
eternitatis , t he tragi-com ic jjgure of t hat stude nt o f _a
famous. At nerican-universitv who, a year or two ago,
used, on the invitation of the wife of a sympathetic
professor, to slip at dusk through her garden that he
might read and think for a few hours in her attic,
undisturbed by those of his fellow students who repre¬
sented more completely than himself the tradition of
the place.

One lives, however, in the world of solid fact, and in
that world it may be hopeless to expect a voting

I I once suggested to the public-spirited head of an endowed Ameri¬
can college that his college might help to create a new standard in
American undergraduate work if it offered entrance only to the ablest
students who applied. He answered, ‘In America we don’t do things
in that way.’

4

Ch. 12

TEACHING AND DOING

3°5

majority even of a single responsible public body in
England or America to found such an experimental
school. Yet the experiment must be made either by a
public body or not at all. No private philanthropist
could possess either the authority or the organization
which would make it possible to discover, with any
approximation to accuracy, the most supernormal mem¬
bers of a sufficiently large child population, or to offer
them opportunities which their parents would be likely
to accept. Therefore one must hope that it may be
possible to break down, at some one point, the tradi¬
tional intellectual and political obstacles which stand in
the way. The first of these obstacles would be the inter¬
pretation which is generally given to the principle of
equality in the distribution of public funds. A public
body cannot act as a private philanthropist can act, on
the half-conscious whim of the moment, or even on
an unexplained series of varying conscious principles. 1
For that reason those who propose such an experiment
must, instead of pretending that they are practising
arithmetical equality of treatment, make it clear that
arith metical inequality is often necessary in orde r-to
secure social justice . Inequality in the distribution of
public funds may follow from inequality either in the
need of the recipient for the services of the community,
or in the need of the community for the services of the
recipient. In some instances of the first case the most
arithmetically-minded adherents of the principle of

1 See Sir Josiah Stamp, Studies in Current Problems in Finance and
Government , 1924, pp. 58-67.

306 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. 12

equality do not object to inequality in the treatment of
children of school age. We are all prepared to spend
more for the cure of a child with incipient tuberculosis
than we can afford to spend on the average child. It is
more difficult to defend inequality of the second" kind,
because it involves a valuation of potential services com¬
pared with each other; and that valuation will vary in
different communities and at different times. The
Commonwealth of Australia might this year, for
instance, decide to incur exceptional expenditure in
training the future athletic champions who will uphold
the glory of their country at the Olympic Sports. The
ancient Athenian Assembly might have spent excep¬
tionally on youths and maidens who could give joy
to their community by supernormal personal beauty.
It is very likely that, a hundred years hence, the most
valued quality in all civilized communities will be the
power of handing on as adults certain ‘dominant’
^physical and intellectual Mendelian strains. At this
moment, however, most communities especially need
the services of those who are capable of performing
with unusual efficiency the process of thought; and
those who believe this should frankly say that they are
prepared to spend more on books, or laboratory
material, or travel, for the child of high intellectual
supernormality, than for the average child.

But have mankind vet learnt to value that, fol lowing
of reason. shff m^y lead’ which Soc rates

tau ght to Plat o and Plato to Aristotle? Socrates died
by the hemlock, and Aristotle and Plato parted in

Ch. 12

TEACHING AND DOING

3 °7

sorrow; and exactly in so far as a school for professional^
t raining in thought is successful will it he the oc casion
oTdivision and st rife. No one has yet invented a pro¬
cess whicbTleacL to unanimity on all the questions which
are most worth thinking on. And if a school supported
from public funds helped a Thomas Carlyle towards
self-expression, it might be attacked by the Labour
Party as a home of reaction; if a Ramsay MacDonald
were found to have been taught there, it might be
accused by the Conservative Party of Bolshevism;
Fundamentalists or Anglo-Catholics might accuse it of
atheism if it produced a St. Paul or Averroes. A cer¬
tain kind of Labour majority on an English local
authority might propose to hand over the management
of the school to the trustees of the Marxist ‘Central
Labour College/ and a certain kind of Conservative
majority might propose to hand it over to the trustees
of the Conservative ‘Philip Stott College’; an American
cinema-producer might bring a photograph of an
American experimental school before an audience with
Ku-Klux sympathies, and write above its gate, as
Aristophanes wrote above his scene of Socrates’ h ouse,
t he jeering title ‘ Thinking done here .’ All men wel-^
come improvements in the prevention of cancer, or the
growth of wheat, but not all men are prepared to wel¬
come improvements in the art of unbiassed thought.,
Some day we may find that a change in our conception
of the place of human consciousness in the universe
has made experiments possible which are now im¬
possible. And meanwhile causes will have their effects,

308 THE ART OF THOUGHT Ch. 12

and whatever may prove to be the best art of thought
will continue to be the best, whether many of those
who have the necessary powers are enabled to practise
that art or few.

INDEX

Accidia, 221, 222
Adams, Sir John:

Child Psychology, 250
Adonis, cult of, 221
Adrian, Dr. E. D., 44n,
169

AEschylus, 28, 91, 167
Agassiz, Louis, 234
Alaric, 219

Albert, Prince Consort,

233 , 28 7
Alekhin, 72

Alexander of Macedon,

232

Anaxagoras, 171
Aquinas, St. Thomas,
171, 215

Archimedes, 43, 233
Aristophanes, 104, 198,
307

Aristotle, 27, 63, 131,

232, 260, 306
De Memoria , 62
Ethics, 155, 167, 212
Poetics , 121

Armstrong, Prof. H.,
245

Arnold, Thomas, 241
Ashley, Miss, 85
Atkinson, G. T., 247
Aubrey, John, 95
Austin, John, 24
Autocrat of the Breakfast
Table (Holmes), 164
Averroes, 307

Bacon, Francis, 84
Baird-Smith, Colonel,
160

Balfour, Francis, 158
Ballantyne, James, 144
Barnes, Canon:

The Problem of Religious
Education , 174
Barrie, J. M.:

Sentimental Tom my,
297n

Baudelaire, 121
Baudouin:

Autosuggestion, 5 3n,2o6,
224

Beethoven, 210, 268
Belloc, Hilaire, 199

INDEX

jio

Bentham, 166, 172, 199,
268, 302

Bernhardt, Sarah, 268
Berthier, Father, 217
Beveridge, Sir William,
T 37 n

Binet, 237, 262
Bird, Grace E., 234a
Blake, William, 108, 122,
208

Bland, Hubert, 299
Boutmy, E.:

Psychologie -politique du
peuple anglais , 175
Boutroux, E., 77
Boyer, James, 299
Brooks, Van Wyck:

Ordeal oj Mark Twain ,
196

Bruce, H. A.:

Psychology and Parent¬
hood. , 8on, 105 n
Bryan, W. J., 116, 190,
201, 202
Buddhism, 172
Burke, Edmund, 175
Burt, Dr. Cyril, 293, 295
Butcher, J. G.:

Translation of Poetics ,
13m

Call, Annie Payson, 170
Power Through Repose ,
162

Campbell, Mrs. Olwen,
12711

Shelley and the Unro¬
mantics , I26n, I59n
Campbell-Bannerman, Sir
Henry, 178

Canterbury, Archbishop
of, 147

Carlyle, Thomas, 92, 307
Latter Day Pamphlets ,

115

Carpenter, Edward, 201
Carrel, A., 89, 143
Carroll, Lewis:

Alice in Wonderland , 70
Cassian, 219, 223
Institutes , 216, 22in
Castlereagh, 302
Cattell, Professor, 262
Catullus, hi
C habanei, Paul:

Le Subconscient chez les
Artistes , 10511
Chamberlain, Austen,
174, 184, 186
Chapman, Dom John,
220,224

INDEX

Chapman, George:

Translation of Iiomer, 91
Chesterton, G.K., : 118,201
Churchill, Winston:

World Crisis, 117
Clemenceau, Georges, 178
Clifford, W. K., 117
Cockburn, Sir Henry:

Memorials, 25211
Coleridge, S. T., 152,

207, 298

Columbia University, 142
Comite des Forges, 184
Communists, Marxian, 33
Copernican astronomy,

“5

Coplestone, Edward, 126
Coss, Prof. J. J., 142
Coue, Emile, 206
Crane, Dr. Frank, 189,
192, 194, 200
Curran, John H., 208
Curzon, Lord, 187

Daltonism, 245
Dante, 159, 199, 210
Darwin, 27, 87, 141, 172,
182, 199, 251
Origin of Species, 124

3ll

Davy, Sir Humphry, 28
Descartes, 28, 148, 171,
199, 228, 251
Dewey, John:

How we Think, 98, 164
Dickens, Charles, 135,
H5

Dionysus, theatre of, 198
Donne, John, 58
Dowden, Edward:

Life of Shelley, i63n
Drew, Mrs. Mary:

Catherine Gladstone, 93
Drinkwater, John, 153,
*95

Loyalties, 101
Olton Pools, 123

Ebbinghaus, 262
Eddington, Prof. A. S.:
Space, Time and Gravi¬
tation, 57

Einstein, 199, 260, 285
Eliot, Dr. Charles W.,
241

A Late Harvest , 240
Eliot, George, 154, 285,
302

Erskine, 144

312

INDEX

Faber, Father, 223

Spiritual Conferences,

221

Faraday, Michael, 28,
182

Fielding, Henry, 182
Finlayson, James, 251
Fisher, Sir Warren, 137,
138

Flexner, Abraham, 246
Forster, E. M.:

A Passage to India , 118
Forster, John:

Life of Dickens, 13511,
145

Fouillee, A., 178

Psychologie du peuple
franfais, 175
Frazer, Sir James:

Golden Bough , 22 m
Freud, Sigmund, 70, 77,
249

Interpretation of Dreams,

74

Froebel, F. W., 233, 234,
236

Fry, Roger:

The Artist and Psycho¬
analysis, 2 ion
Fundamentalists, 191

Galileo, 115
Galton, Francis:

Enquiries into Human
Faculty and its De¬
velopment, 262
Garnett, Constance, 108
Garnett, Dr. William, 261
Gary Schools, 246
Germanus, 216
Ghiberti, 28
Gibbon, Edward, 92
Gilgamish Epic, 190
Gilkes, A. H., 289
Gladstone, Mrs., Life,
92

Gladstone, W. E., 92, 178
Godwin, William, 127,
128, 162

Political Justice, 126
Goethe, 90, 228, 291
Gokhale, 303
de Goncourt, R., 8on
Gorky, Maxim, 111
Graves, Robert, 71

Haldane, Prof. J. S., 39n
Mechanism, Life and
Personality, and The
New Physiology, 57

INDEX

3i3

Hamilton, Alexander, 28,
234, 268

Hammond, J. L. and B.,
42 n

Harcourt, Sir William,
158n

Hare, J. H. M., 242, 302
Hartley, David, 32
Harvard, President of, x 37
Harvey, William, 182
Hazlitt, Henry:

Thinking as a Science,

i°5> 1 39 j *53
Head, Dr. Henry, 36, 40,
58

Hegel, G. W. F., 24, 171,
172

Helmholtz, Hermann
von, 79, 80, 89, 93,
96, 141, 241
Hertzog, General, 199
Heuristic Method, 245
Hitchener, Elizabeth, 12 6,
127

Hobbes, Thomas, 63, 64,
65, 141

Leviathan , 62, 83, 95,
”5

Hobson, S. G.:

National Guilds , 288n

Holbein, Hans, 274
Homer, 92 .

Horace, 92, 112
Housman, A. E., 159,
160

Howley, Prof. J., 217,
224

Psychology and Mystical
Experience, 215
Hughes, William, 199
d’Hulst, Mgr., 22in

The IF ay of the Heart,
222n

Hume, David, 32, 64n
Hunt, Leigh, 298
Huxley, Julian:

Essays of a Biologist, 56
Huxley, T. H., 84, 147,
182

Science, Art, and Educa¬
tion, 85n

Ignatian Meditation, 225
Ignatius Loyola, Saint,
217, 227

Independence, Declara¬
tion of, 172

Industrial Revolution,
132

INDEX

34

d’Indy, Vincent, 104
Inge, Dean, 21 1
Ingpen, I28n

Letters of P. B. Shelley ,
i 27 n

Isaac, Abbot, 216

Jackson, Andrew, 188
James, Henry, 144, 195
James, William, 77, 159,
162, 186, 187, 201,
214, 228, 285
Principles , 95n, 96,

122, 15m, 165
Selected Papers on Philo¬
sophy. , i6on, 165,
202n

Varieties of Religious Ex¬
periences ,212,213
Jastrow:

The Subconscious , 90
Jefferson, Thomas, 172,
188

Jesuits, 226
Joan of Arc, 209
Jonson, Ben, 28

Kaiser, the, 116
Kameneff, 187

Keats, 91, 302
Kelvin, Lord, 228, 285,
302

Kennedy, Dr., 247
Kepler, 233

Keynes, J. Maynard, 291
Economic Consequences of
the Peace , 132
Kitchener, Lord, 137
Kitson, H. D., 240, 246
How to Use your Mind ,
239, 25cm
Koffka, K.:

The Growth of Mind ,
3i

Kohler:

The Mentality of Apes ,
3L 230

Kreisler, Fritz, 234
Kiilpe, 109

Lachapelle, G., 181
Lamb, Charles, 297, 298
Lashley, K. S., 43
Law, English and French,
182

League of Nations, 1x5
Assembly of, 184
Leibnitz, G. W., 28

Index

Lenin, 24, 45
Leuba:

The Psychology of Relig¬
ious Mysticism , 222
Lewis, Sinclair, 189
Babbitt , 192

Liebig, Baron Justus v.,

26, 33

Organic Chemistry , 29
Lippmann, Walter, 138
Lloyd, Charles, 298
Locarno, Pact, 23
Locke, John, 57, 64n,
172, 199

Essay Concerning Human
Understanding , 64
Loeb, J., 38n, 39n, 57
Louis XV, 172
Lusk, Senator, 199
Lutherans, 213
Lyttelton, Lord, 93

Macaulay, Lord, 92
MacCurdy, J. T., 32,
39 n

Problems in Dynamic
Psychology , 32
MacDonald, J. Ramsay,

3°7

3*5

MacDougall, W., 34, 39n
Outline of Psychology ,
32, 38n, 42n
Social Psychology , 48
McKim, Charles, 195
McLoughlin, 239, 240
McMurry, Prof. F. M.:

How to Study , 98, 245
Madison, James, 28
Manning, Cardinal, 88
Marlowe, Christopher, 28
Marx, Karl, 39n
Das Kapital , 35
Masaccio, 28
Masefield, John, 160
Maudsley, H.:

The Physiology of Mind ,
162

Maxwell, James Clerk,
158 .

Metropolitan Museum of
Fine Art (New
York), 195

Mill, John Stuart, 153,
154

Autobiography , 15511
Milton, John, in, 159,
268, 302

Paradise Lost , 150
Mohammedanism, 172

INDEX

3x6

Montaigne, 105, 182
Montesquieu:

Esprit des Lois , 177
Morgan, Prof. Lloyd, 166
Morris, William, 156,242
Mozart, 151, 210, 268
Mumford, E. P., 4m
Murry, J. Middleton, 159
Problem oj Style , 100,
hi, 12m, 151,

158, 251

Mussolini, 24, 46, 187
Myers, Prof. C. S., 35,
39 n , 169

Napoleon, 235
Napoleonic War, 130
Nelson, 268

Neoplatonist, mysticism,
205

Nettleship,Richard Lewis,
248

Nevinson, H. W.:

Changes and Chances ,
289n

New Republic, 233, 240,
241, 278

Nicholson, William:

New Review , 116

Nunn, T. P., 38n, 39n

Education , Its Data and
First Principles , 3 8

O’Leary, De Lacy:

Archaic Thought and its
Place in History ,

2i5n

O’Neill, Eugene, 200
Oundle, school, 302
Oxford International Psy¬
chological Congress,
35, 58n, 169, 215

Page, W. H., 186, 187,
291

Life , 202

Painleve, Paul, 184
Palacios, Prof. Asin:

Escatologia Musselmana ,
215

Palmerston, Lord, 174,
178, 183
Paul, Abbot, 222
Paul, Saint, 205, 307
Peacock, Thomas Love,
128

Petrarch, 113

INDEX

3 T 7

Phidias, 210
Pilgrim’s Progress, 164
Pillsbury, W. B., 54
The Fundamentals of
Psychology , 29
Plato, 28, 91, 121, 129,
199, 210, 228, 230,
231, 232, 233, 291,
306

Phtedrus , 55, 56, 128,
209

Re-public , 55
Symposium , Son, 128
Tim ceus, 209
PleJbs League, 48

Outline of Psychology, 33
Poincar^, Henri, 76, 77,
80, 81, 93, 96, 180,
181

Science and Method, 75,
80, 94

Poincare, Raymond, 183,
187

Prescott, Prof. F. C.:

The Poetic Mind, 56n,
120

Project Method, 245

Rabelais, 182
Reform Club, 26

Rembrandt, 210
Richardson, Leon B., 277
Rignano, E.:

The Psychology of Rea¬
soning, 8on, i62n,

17 5 n

Rivera, 24

Rockefeller Institute, 143
Roman law, 27
Roscoe, F., 280
Rousseau, 233
Rousseauism, 172
Royer-Collard, P. P., 175

Salisbury, Lord, 178
Sanderson, of Oundle,

24 5

Santayana, G., i88n
Schiller, 105
Schopenhauer, Arthur:
Parerga und Paralipo-
mena, 91

Scott, Sir Walter, 144
Selborne, Lord, 174
Shaftesbury, Lord, 42,
68n

Shakespeare, 28, 102,

123

Shand, A. F., 160

318 IN]

Shaw, Bernard, x 56, 164,
201, 285, 299
John Bull’s Other Island,
193

Shelley, 91, 125, 126,
128, 162, 241, 285
Defence of Poetry, 128,
I3°> I3!> r 3 2
Philosophical View of
Reform, 130

Sherrington, Sir Charles,
32, 44n

Shrewsbury School, 11 x
Shuttleworth, J. K., 2 83n
Sidgwick, Henry:

A Memoir, 157, 15 8n
Siddons, Mrs., 268
Sidney, Sir Philip, 268
Simonides; 160
Simplicissimus, 116
Smith, Logan Pearsall,
117, 125

Socrates, 28, 104, 167,
198, 209, 230, 306,
3°7

Sophocles, 28, 239
Spencer, Herbert, 153,
155, 162

Autobiography, I54n
Synthetic Philosophy, 172

EX

Spencer, Lord, 178
Spender, J. A.:

Life of Sir Henry
Campbell-Bannerman,
I 78 n

Spinoza, Baruch, 199, 234
Stamp, Sir Josiah, 291
Studies in Current Prob¬
lems in Finance and
Government, 305 n
Stephens, James, 102
Stone, C. W., 250
Story, William Wetmore,
195

Strachey, Lytton, 116, 177
Queen Victoria, 174
Sufist, mysticism, 205
Swinburne, Algernon, 151

Taine, H., 175
Tasso, 128

Tawney, R. H., 268, 275,
276

Secondary Education for
All, 266, 279
Tchehov, Anton, 111
Letters, 108

Teachers’ Registration
Council, 279 seq.

INDEX

3 i 9

Teresa, Saint, 213
Terry, Ellen, 268
Theosophist, mysticism,
205

Thirty Years War, 185
Thouless, Dr. R. H., 2x4
Titchener, E. B.:

Experimental Psychology
of the Thought Pro¬
cesses, 98n

Feeling and Attention, 109
Trevelyan, C. P., 267
Trevelyan, Sir G. O.:

Life of Macaulay , 92n
Trollope, Anthony, 88
Autobiography, 92
Tsai, Dr., 124
Tufnell, E. C., 283n
Twain, Mark, 196, 197

Vandals, 219
Vardon, Harry, 48, 100
Ho zv to Play Golf, 46
Varendonck, Dr. J.:

Bay Dreams, 66—77,

8 5> 97> i°i, 104,

^ T 35> x 3 6 > x 4°j 2 ion
Evolution of the Conscious
Faculties, 73, 75n

Velasquez, 2x0
Versailles, Treaty of, 23,
132, 183, 184
Victoria, Queen, 116
Vinci, Leonardo da, 291
Virgil, 112
Vischer, 105
Voltaire, 92

Letters on the English,

l 77

Wace, Dean of Canter¬
bury, 147
Wace and Schaff:

Select Library of Nicene
and Post - Nicene
Fathers , 21611
Wallace, A. R., 87
Wallas, Graham:

Human Nature in Poli¬
tics, 12 in

Our Social Heritage ,
83n, 249n, 282n

The Great Society , 95n
Warren, Prof. Howard
C.:

History of the Association
Psychology , 62n, 64n
Watson, Dr. J. B., 3811,

43) 57) 5 8

INDEX

320

Webb, S. and B., 282
Webb, Sidney, 261, 299
Wells, H. G., 201, 246,
3°°

Outline of History , 190
Whitman, Walt, 196
Woodworth, R. S.:

Dynamic Psychology , 37n
Wordsworth, 90, 152,

159, 160

Wundt:

Grundziige ‘ der Physio-
logischen Psychologie ,
98

Yale Review, 138
Young, Edward:

Conjectures on Original
Composition , 124

theology library

CLAREMONT, CALIF

C ? c f$

ISJ~

- <Jr~Z_jui v^^tri^-W* V- '*S fxx +j. d

£*jcyyb-i>^ & ±<nM4. ^ ^ fj L/*a txbtuJi '£*s&0j

'fax. J<l_X—

n>. liuu^ o^-e. %JV&C# a.

t p . X -JL /J ^ * -f Q \ rtf ~fc>- "^-

^ et, ^

*- c /- r~~

U

L_4 \^-^—y '~-— /